


Nub Saar

by JediMordsith



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Artifacts, Blood, Body Horror, Corpses, Evil Jewelry, F/M, Luke Skywalker needs Mara Jade, My first attempt at writing horror, Possession, Racing, Secret Relationships, Sith Shenanigans, Whump, a little bit of morbid and creepifying, derelict space stations, especially if you think about it, evil vegetation, our heroes are totally inappropriately dressed for this adventure, the one time Han doesn't ship it, there's some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-25
Packaged: 2019-07-17 07:54:24
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 21,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16091303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JediMordsith/pseuds/JediMordsith
Summary: Luke wants three very simple things:1. To find the mysterious being stealing Sith artifacts and stop them before they bring the galaxy crashing down.2. To hold Mara to her promise of leaving Karrde and joining him on Yavin IV as soon as #1 is accomplished.3. To get the Senate and his family to stop micromanaging his life and his Academy- which he's pretty sure will be a natural outcome of #2.If taking on a derelict space station and unknown Dark presence are what it takes, he's there... except that the Darkness wants Mara, too. How far is each side willing to go to have her? They're about to find out.





	1. Eskaron

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks are due to Frangi who let me whine at her about this at length and to Celina for generously beta-ing it for me.

_Coruscant, 11 ABY_

Disembodied footfalls echoed down the cavernous halls of the Temple ruins, syncopated and punctuated with the ring of spectral blaster fire. Youngling’s shrieks mingled with the urgent shouts of war-hardened Knights, the imprint of their voices reverberating from the soaring domed ceilings that capped the vast chambers. Overhead, the corpses of frescoed gods peered down through blacked-out eyes, reaching for Luke with scorched limbs he passed beneath them, decades-old debris and cracked marble crunching under his boots with every measured step.

 _Darkness,_ their scarred mouths whispered. _Darkness comes again._

Wraiths brushed against his robes, smudges of color amongst the Processional Way’s deep shadows. The stagnant air was thick with the trapped death rattles of a thousand souls.

 _Tell me,_ Luke thought at the phantasms surrounding him. _Tell me what you know._

The dead gave no answer.

At the final crumbling archway, Luke picked his way through the splintered remains of friezed, Laroon-wood doors and across the charred remains of the embroidered carpet that had once lined the central walkway. Pillars marched into the blackness on either side, silent and stately sentinels keeping watch over the Temple-turned-tomb.  

His feet slowed as he neared the end, reluctance dragging them to a full stop between the final two pillars. For a split second, the magcon shield separating the pillars from the landing platform shimmered. In its silver-touched cerulean crescent, Luke thought he could see the outline of the spirits that waited for him, immutable and perpetually patient. His shoulders sagged. Resigned, he filled his lungs with one last breath from the Temple’s dusty, desolate stillness and slipped through the shield into the dazzling light of a late Coruscant afternoon.

A warm, early-Spring breeze, thoughtfully engineered by the planetary Weathernet, wafted across the platform. Noise rushed in – the hum of repulsarlifts, the clang of maintenance droids repairing the exterior of a nearby building, the chime of the railspeeder station down the block. Directly ahead, long lines of speeder traffic crisscrossed the artificially perfect sky between the Temple District’s cloudcutters.

“You’re lucky Leia’s off planet.”

Luke turned toward the unexpected but familiar drawl, lifting his hands to push back the hood of his cloak.

Han lounged against the side of an Alderaanean-blue XP-38, arms folded across his chest. “You know she hates when you skulk around in there.”

“Jedi Masters don’t skulk.”

“Sure they don’t.” Solo pushed off the vehicle. “Get in the speeder.”

There was no point in arguing. Luke slid into the passenger’s seat, the coarse fabric of his mud-brown robe whispering across the buttery synth-leather of the seat. For a moment, as he watched Han flip switches to start the speeder’s reinforced transparisteel top whirring shut, Skywalker desperately missed the shabby and dented T-16 he’d owned on Tatooine. He barely got to fly anything at all these days. It was just one tiny sacrifice among the multitude that came with the responsibilities he’d shouldered as head of the New Jedi Order. 

“So.” Han maneuvered the sleek speeder into the express diplomatic lane. “The way I see it, you have two choices.”

“Really.” Luke hated the sound of his own voice. Neutral. Placid. Detached.

“I can tell Leia you were being a funti again.” Han slanted a glance in Luke’s direction that suggested exactly how well _that_ would go over, “or, you can come with me to the Cularin system. By the time we get back, I figure I’ll have conveniently forgotten to tell her about your little indiscretion.”

Luke peered at his brother-in-law, faint curiosity and much stronger wariness rousing. “What’s in the Cularin system?”

Han shot him a scandalized look. “Don’t tell me you don’t know about the Eskaron Race? A pilot like you?”

Energy sizzled through Luke’s veins like he’d grabbed a live wire. “Eskaron?” he repeated incredulously.

“Yeah.” A smug smile spread across Solo’s handsome face. “Guess who just got invited to host it this year? Seems like somebody’s finally givin’ credit where it’s due for my little Kessel Run maneuver.”

Thoughts sprinted through Luke’s mind, tumbling over one another in thrilling haste. _Eskaron. Mara. He must not know._ He was supposed to stay away, but with a real cover -.

It was the makings of a nightmare and a dream come true.

“Chewie’s not gonna get back from Kashyyyk in time,” Han continued, confidently. “I thought maybe you an’ me -.”

“When do we leave?” Luke interrupted.

Han’s eyes cut in his direction, his smile stretching to a grin at the unexpectedly enthusiastic response. “First thing tomorrow morning.”

Luke let the rest of Han’s words wash over him, vague and undefined. Mental images played out across his vision – gaudy, high-tech racers painted in every imaginable eye-searing shade of neon. Dozens of species of obscenely rich beings drifting around, giddily and raucously drunk. Mara’s hand, curling around his arm as she fell in beside him, anchored him.

Memories of Endor bloomed, unbidden. Fireworks bursting ceaselessly across the sky deep into the early hours of the morning. A dividing line in his life, illuminated in bright splashes of color. When the last burst had faded and the sun broke over the jungle, everything had been new. Different. 

If everything went according to plan, Esakaron would be an event horizon of a different sort. He couldn’t wait.

 

* * *

 

Luke leaned against the wall that backed his bunk, the soft hum of the _Falcon_ seeping into his bones. Han was asleep in the cockpit, at peace with the familiar, quiet clank and steady vibrations of his beloved ship as it skimmed through hyperspace. Capacious stillness enfolded the crew quarters and Luke rubbed his forehead, trying to refocus on the tiny words cluttering his datapad. 

> _Moreover, it has been proposed that supplemental administrative reinforcement may become_ _unavoidable should the situation at the conservatorie deteriorate into the necrosis of auxiliary novice or adventitious personnel._

Anxiety shot through him when he managed to translate the Senate gibberish into something passing for Basic. _They want to assign more oversight to the Academy the next time someone dies. They’re **assuming** more people are going to die._

And why wouldn’t they? His stomach plummeted. Gantoris had died on his watch – burned to death in his own room. It was still sealed off, the charnel-house odor clinging relentlessly to its walls. 

He hadn’t even been on planet when Dorsk 81 immolated himself alive to save the other students from Pellaeon’s marauding fleet. And Kyp. If it hadn’t been for Mara -. Luke shied away from the memory. Forced himself back into the report. 

> _Repeated inquiries and Senatorial probes, led by representatives of unimpeachable conduct, have consistently resulted in testimony ascribing to incumbent management only the noblest of aspirations and admirably sacrificial comportment._

Unimpeachable conduct. Senate verbiage for “un-bribable.” His gut twisted.  _They think I’d bribe someone. Or mind trick them?_

The formal wording was mocking, rife with thinly-veiled threats and insults. _Incumbent management. Implying what? That they intend to replace me?_

Agitation crawled under his skin, a swarm of biting insects gnawing at tense muscle. _My students. They can’t – no one else can protect them like I can - I **try** to -_.

Luke’s breath caught, sweat breaking out on the palm of left hand. _Kam. They’ll give the Academy to Kam. Force him to lead. He doesn’t want to, but there isn’t anyone else. Or - Corran?_

Luke imagined his friend backed into a corner. Forced to choose between his family and the job he loved and saving the Academy. If he refused, what would happen to the others? They were vulnerable, untrained. It wasn’t safe – they’d be separated, picked off –.

He jolted to a stop, suddenly aware that he’d been moving. Thrusting out a hand, he pressed it against the bulkhead, the coolness of the metal a shock. He willed his panting breaths to slow. Two more steps and he’d have been in the lounge. Han would have heard him. Woken.

Luke took a shaky breath and dragged a hand over his face. Slowly, silently, he slunk back into the dimly lit corridor, his feet carrying him unsteadily toward his bunk. This was – how many times was this, now, that he’d nearly lost himself? He didn’t know, didn’t want to count. It was a miracle he hadn’t been caught out.

Sinking onto his bunk, he swung his feet up. Made himself lay down, his body still taut with tension. Closing his eyes, he sucked long, deep pulls of the recirculated air into his lungs and visualized a pair of eyes the color of the brightest Emerald wine. Luke let himself fall into memories – good ones, this time.

 _Two days,_ he thought, as his body began the tedious process of unwinding. _I won’t be alone anymore. Everything will be all right. It will._

 

* * *

 

 Without Leia and the kids to feed, they made breakfast a simple affair of caff, poached Nuna eggs, and toast thickly smeared with blue butter. Buoyed by the promise of the day to come, Luke joked and debated the merits of various racing freighters with Han over the meal like the farm boy he’d been rather than the Jedi he was. Han’s own mood was ebullient, enough that he altered their reversion coordinates.

“Trust me,” he told Luke seriously, punching the changes into the nav computer. “You’ll never get a better view of the course than this.”

The stars collapsed from pearled streaks to glowing white pinpricks in a blink, the atmosphere tight with pressure for the space of two breaths as they reverted into real space. The thrusters fired, rotating them, and then brought the _Falcon_ to a full stop. The course of the galactically-renowned Eskaron Race strung across the ship’s central viewport in a stunning display.

At the far right of the _Falcon’s_ field of vision, Almas Station glittered like a corusca gem. A cloud of small ships hovered and buzzed around it like Hrelan bees, carrying an influx of racers, sponsors, gamblers, and thrill-seekers. 

Center course, backlit by the swirling, brightly colored mists of the gas giant Genarius, was the race’s greatest claim to fame: the dull, misshapen shell of the hollow Eskaron moon. 

A sibilant whisper at the edge of his perception yanked Luke’s attention left. At its apogee, the course forked into two equally hellish midpoints – a volatile, densely packed asteroid belt and the ruins of Nub Saar. The insect-like carapaces of Raflkind harvesters hunched in greedy clusters around the station’s battered skeleton, picking it clean of valuable radiation.

“There ya go,” Han motioned grandly. “Eighty-three years of death and glory – the only good thing a Hutt ever did.”

Luke nodded automatically, too ensnared in the howling starscape to form words. Almas Station was a blinding spectacle of giddy enthusiasm, avarice and conceit, sparking and fizzing in the Force like fireworks and champagne. Eskaron’s cavernous bowels shrieked with the rage and terror of beings long dead.

But it was Nub Saar that dragged him in like a gravity well. The station was _waiting_.

Time stretched as Luke reached deeper into the murky edges of the wreck’s aura. There was a presence, something -.

“Luke.”

Skywalker’s head snapped sideways. The _Falcon’s_ cockpit jarred back into place around him.

Han’s face was close to his own, hazel eyes narrowed and wary. “You all right?”

“Yeah.” Luke summoned a practiced smile. Han was harder to fool than most, so he added a sheepish half-shrug of his shoulders – a call back to the innocent farm kid his brother-in-law had known and missed. “Almas – everyone’s excitement – it’s… a little mesmerizing. In the Force. 

“Right.” Han eyed him for another few seconds, then grinned. “Told ya it’s the best race of the year.” He leaned back into the comfortable cradle of his seat and swung it to face the console, his hands moving with familiar ease to the controls. “C’mon, let’s go join the craziness.” 

 

* * *

 

 Meticulously conditioned air frizzled across Luke’s skin and ruffled the tips of his hair when they stepped out of the airlock onto the docking concourse. Situated on a mezzanine that ran in a full circle around the exterior of one of the station’s highest levels, it was comfortably wide and well lit. Concealed projectors splashed vibrant, full-sized holos advertising the station’s amenities and pleasures – from the mundane to the tawdry – on the walls between the airlocks. From beyond the railing, the electronic peals of betting machines and bookie droids wafted up from the open floor below, intermingled with the thrumming voices of the thousands of excited sentients thronging the central promenade.

“There’s supposed to be some kind of welcoming committee,” Han said, taking in the lay of the land with a casual sweep of his gaze. It was an old smuggler’s habit he’d never shaken. “Can’t believe you wore a tux,” he grumbled when his eyes flicked past his brother-in-law.

Luke ran a hand over his starched jacket self-consciously and stretched his senses through the tumult of beings, searching for the only one that mattered. “It’s a formal event,” he murmured, distracted. “And I can’t risk Leia assigning Umolly again.”

Han huffed but didn’t disagree. Leia kept a sharp eye on her brother these days and, if his appearance and behavior to didn’t stay up to snuff, assigned him micromanagement (“for the good of the Jedi Order”) in the form of Umolly - the only being in the galaxy more dedicated to proper protocol than Threepio. She was well-intentioned but entirely suffocating.

“Well, if it isn’t our illustrious host himself!”

Luke and Han both turned to see Lando Calrissian striding toward them, his powder-blue satin cape flaring dramatically around a darker blue, fashionably cut suit that advertised his trim form to its best advantage.

“Lando!” Han grinned and swung his bag over one shoulder, reaching out with his free hand to clasp hands with his old friend. “Look at you.”

Calrissian pulled Han into a quick, one-armed embrace before pulling back, all smiles. “You’re not looking so bad yourself,” he teased, slapping Han’s shoulder. “Though I imagine your lovely wife won’t be too pleased when she finds out you wore _that_.”

“Don’t you start,” Solo rolled his eyes. “What’re you doin’ here, anyway?”

Lando put a hand to his chest in mock affront. “Miss the most gambled on race of the year? Just how respectable do you think I’ve gotten?” Reaching around Han, he grasped Luke’s hand in quick, firm shake. “Luke - good to see you.”

“Thanks, Lando.” Luke smiled but got no further. His attention snagged on the compact blaze of bronzed-amber Force energy he’d been hunting for and he trailed a mental finger along its edge in mute appeal.

“Respectable enough that you’re my welcoming committee,” Han retorted, shaking his head. “You are, aren’t you?”

“I am indeed,” Lando ushered them toward a lift. “Though I still can’t believe they’re letting you host. Standards aren’t what they used to be – I’ll tell you that.”

“Hey!”

Luke stepped directly to the back wall of the turbo lift, letting the others position themselves shoulder to shoulder in front of him, bickering amicably. As the doors shut, there was a rush of warmth and the phantom scent that always reminded him of bachani blossoms. She knew he was here. Everything else evaporated as her welcome engulfed him. His eyes fluttered closed and he sank gratefully into the escape of Mara’s presence.

“Luke?”

There was a hand on his arm. Grudgingly, Luke dragged himself back into his body and opened his eyes.

“You all right there, buddy?”

Lando was peering at him in concern. Behind him, the lift doors were open, waiting for them to disembark. Just outside the lift, Han stood frowning. Luke forced a smile.

“Yeah, sorry.” He ducked his head, calling up a faint blush for effect. “There’s a lot to feel here, in the Force. I got… distracted.”

Calrissian chuckled. “I wouldn’t want to feel this place on your level,” he agreed, one hand latching politely onto Luke’s elbow and steering him out of the lift. The crisp black and starched white of Luke’s attire flashed in the lift’s polished interior surfaces as they moved. Three steps later they were in a long corridor that curved away on both sides, stately doors interrupting the brightly muraled walls at even intervals.

“Your rooms are down here,” Lando said, leading them. He slid a hand into a perfectly tailored pocket and produced two keycards. “Here. You’ve got Penthouse suites and Mara’s already swept them to make sure there are no bugs.”

“Mara?” Han asked sharply. “As in Jade? I thought you were done with her!”

“Look,” Lando said, placatingly. “I know you two have had your differences -.”

“She’s a child-killer,” Solo snapped. “You could have _anybody_ , and you’re charging up _her_ loading ramp?”

“Han,” Luke cut him off, severely. “Don’t.”

“We’re not together like that,” Lando said, firmly. “We’re working a job together.” His comm beeped and he slid it out of his pocket. “The organizers are ready to meet you,” he told Han. “Why don’t you let Luke take your bags to your rooms while you and I head to Race Central?” He shifted his gaze to Luke. “You can get settled in, then meet us at the _Cosmic Deck_ cantina in half an hour, all right?”

“Sure.” Luke plucked Han’s bag from his hand and, without waiting for confirmation, ducked down the next hall, cutting toward the place where the Force told him he’d find Mara.  Three short turns later, he found his room, fumbled his keycard through the lock and shoved the door open.

She could have been a fire goddess just stepped down from one of the wall murals. Her red-gold tresses had been braided into an elaborate coronet around her head and studded with Tandgor-gem pins. Gold shimmersilk edged in transparent filigree swept down from her left shoulder to cinch in artful gathers at her waist. At her hip, it fell away in waves. The rich color accented her creamy skin and sheer silk exposed tantalizing glimpses of one breast and long expanse of her right leg, decorum barely preserved by strategic swirls of embroidery. A gauzy cape fluttered from her shoulder to her ankles.

Luke spilled his bags and Han’s on the floor and kicked the door shut again with a booted heel.

“You’re tired,” she chastised before he could open his mouth. “You’re not resting. What did I tell you?”

“You told me you’d come back.” Luke closed the distance between them in a few commanding strides and caught her wrists. Pivoting, he swung her around until she was pressed against the wall, hands pinned above her head. “Tell me you’re still coming back.”

Mara’s eyes narrowed. “Tired _and_ sloppy,” she upbraided. “Do you know how many ways I could kill you right now, Skywalker?”

“Four?” he guessed, grinning stupidly at her and uncaring that he was helpless to stop.

“Seven.” She sniffed haughtily, but one bare foot snaked around his leg to drag up the back of his calf in wordless invitation.

“Please tell me,” he said, just before he captured her mouth hungrily, “that at least one of those ways involves kriffing me to death.”

“Presumptuous,” she huffed when he pulled back.

Luke wasn’t fooled – he saw the way her eyes chased his lips, felt her foot hook a little tighter behind his knee. “Mmm,” he agreed, adjusting his grip so that he held both her wrists in one hand. He slid the other down her arm, across her bare shoulder, then ran his finger tantalizingly along the neckline of her gown. “Tell me you’re coming back with me, Mara. Tomorrow, when the race is over.”

She shifted, misgivings eddying across her sense as her expression fell solemn. “That’s risky,” she warned him, seriously. “Being connected to me publicly – I’d never ask that. I told you we can-.”

“I _need_ you. ” Luke’s hand hit the wall beside Mara’s head with a smack and he flinched. This wasn’t right. Jedi didn’t – Uncle Owen would have had his _hide_ -.

“I’m not backing out,” Mara’s voice was sharp. “You know I would never.” She searched his face carefully, prodded at him unevenly with her unrefined sense. “Has it been that bad? You should have said.”

Guilt twinged deep and Luke’s mouth twisted in a remorseful grimace. She was on this assignment _for him_. She was giving up everything for him. He shouldn’t be like this - ungrateful. Distracting, when she needed her concentration most.

“I’m fine. Really,” he added, at her blatant skepticism. “Just, like you said – stressed. Not sleeping.”

Mara considered that, her keen eyes never leaving him. Seeing straight through him, no doubt, as she always did.

He hadn’t meant to worry her – he hadn’t. Releasing her wrists, he eased back. Slid his arms around her waist and rested his forehead against hers. Said softly, “I just… missed you. Nobody else makes everything work right the way you do.”

As he’d hoped, Mara’s sense took on a rosy hue at the praise – the blush of satisfaction she never let show on her skin. The intensity of her scrutiny altered, became resolve of a different sort. She peeked around him at the chrono on the wall and his heart thudded in hope. 

“The organizers will want to talk Solo’s ears off,” she informed him, briskly, her hands tucking under the pleated folds of his snowy-white cummerbund and catching the waistband of his trousers. She speared him with a stern look. “No marks where they’ll show, don’t touch the hair and careful of the thigh holster.”

Elation washed through Luke, incredible lightness in its wake.  “I can do that." 

Grasping fistfuls of her voluminous skirt, he hiked it toward her hips. She was really was a goddess.

 

* * *

 

 Luke was combing his hair back into some semblance of order when Mara’s comm went off. He heard her silence it, then hiss. Deciding his hair was as good as it was going to get, he checked to make sure all the elements of his tux were properly back in place, then stepped out of the ‘fresher. A quick glance at the chrono told him he had three minutes to make it to the cantina.

Mara, already impossibly primped back into perfection, was glaring at her comm. “I have to go.” Snatching her clutch off the bed, she threw the comm into it and snapped it shut.

“Something wrong?” Luke quickly tossed his bags and Han’s onto the bed and trailed her to the door.

“My pilot missed his check-in.”

Luke held the door open for her. “Maybe he checked in with Lando.”

“He’s not stupid enough to think that gets him out of checking in with me,” she said, tartly.

Luke lifted an elbow in her direction and, despite her pique, she slipped her hand around his arm. “Well,” Luke checked the chrono on his comm. “Maybe he’s just running fashionably late – like we’re about to.”

In the lift, Mara hit the buttons for the twenty-second and twenty-third floors. “Cantina’s on the twenty-third,” she told him. “I’ll get off on the twenty-second and loop around, come in from the other side.”

Anxiety and irritation prickled across his shoulders. “If this is about Han, don’t.” 

She turned to face him, her face already set in the obdurate I’m-on-a-mission expression he was intimately familiar with. “The job isn’t done, Skywalker. Until we’ve got our artifact thieves and their collectors trussed up in the _Lady Luck_ , the mission takes priority. I don’t have time for Solo’s dramatics.”

“You’re right.” Luke held up his hands, palms out. “I’m sorry. I just -.” The lift stopped and the door slid open. He needed to stop talking. Needed to just go to the cantina and have a drink and _wait._ “Never mind.”

“Stop worrying,” Mara commanded. She paused in front of him, halfway out of the turbolift, her lips quirking. “This is - what’s that koochu Rebel term Antilles always uses? A Negative Chicken Alarm?”  

The words had never sounded so ridiculous as they did in Mara’s refined, faintly Coruscanti-accented diction. Luke laughed, bright and unexpected. “I love you.” 

“Of course you do.” Mara favored him with a smug smirk and a quick wink and was gone.

 

* * *

 

 “What took ya so long, Kid?” Han ran a critical eye over Luke as he slid into the booth.

“There’s a lot to see,” Luke leaned forward and helped himself to one of the glasses of sparkling citrus water from the circular tray in the center of the table. “Some of the displays people have set up on the modifications they’ve made to their engines are impressive.”

Solo snorted and lifted a squat, square glass of malt-colored liquor. “Can’t hold a candle to the _Falcon_ , I’ll tell you that.”

“Calrissian.” Mara plowed in from the opposite direction Luke had arrived from. Ignoring Luke and Han entirely, she propped one hand on her hip, the other gesturing short and impatiently. “Where’s Parham?”

“I was hoping you knew. I’ve been trying to rouse him.” Calrissian lifted his right hand to show her the comm link he’d been using. “He’s never missed a check-in before.” 

“Aletro Parham?” Han directed the question to Lando but never quite took his eyes off Mara, his expression dark. “The navigator?”  
  
“He’s taken up racing since you knew him,” Lando clarified. “He’s very good. I recruited him to run the ship I’ve got in today’s race.” He glanced at Mara, concern creasing his face. “Something’s wrong.”

“I’m going to check the hangar,” Mara announced, pointing a decisive finger at Lando. “You do a sweep of the cantinas.”

“He won’t be drinking,” Lando said with certainty. “But I’ll check anyway.” 

“We’ll go with you,” Han rose with deceptively lazy ease. “We could use a stroll. C’mon Kid.”

Luke snuck a glance at Mara. It was on the tip of his tongue to offer to help her, but her warning look silenced him. “All right.” Taking his water flute, he stood and ambled after the other two, refusing to let himself look back after Mara’s disappearing form.

He half listened as Han tried to pry information about the job they were doing out of Lando and Calrissian skillfully deflected. It made for fair entertainment, actually, and Luke almost enjoyed himself. Right up until the moment the skin on the back of his neck prickled. He abruptly put his flute down on the nearest flat surface, half turning, scanning the station for whatever it was the Force already knew.

Lando’s comm went off. Sweeping it from a pocket, he thumbed it alive, glancing at the indicator as he lifted it to his jaw. “You found Parham? 

“What’s left of him,” Mara’s voice ground out of the tiny device. “Get down here. Now.”

 

* * *

 

Lando used a key card Luke recognized as a Ghent Special to open the sealed launching bay without setting off any alarms. Mara was crouched atop the racer when they reached the assigned niche, her skirts bunched around her and tucked between her knees to keep them out of the way.   One hand was braced flat against the Cannibalizer’s top while she leaned far over into the open cockpit and stabbed at the controls with her other hand.  

“Over there,” she bit out in Lando’s direction, jerking her chin toward the racer’s far side. Luke ducked around the ship behind his friend, Han on his heels.

“Haar’chak,” Solo muttered, rubbing at his chin grimly.

What remained of the top of Aletro Parham’s head bore a disturbing resemblance to a minced loth-rat pie Luke had once choked down in a seedy cantina in the depths of the Karfeddion Spaceport.

“What did this?” Lando called up to Mara.

“Vibroknuckler,” she replied, bluntly. “Had to be. Nothing else makes that kind of mess.”

Luke had never seen a vibroknuckler in person. The four-bladed, fist-mounted, pressure-activated weapons were massively illegal, even in the sketchily-policed Outer Rim. He could see why.

“Ground’s clean,” Han observed, tersely. “She didn’t find ‘im here.”

“Cockpit,” Mara said shortly, from above. “The system’s been wiped. Someone must have tipped off our targets.”

A tone sounded over the station’s intercom.

“That’s the first prompt.” The polished face of Lando’s chrono flashed in the hanger lights as he twisted his wrist. “This place’ll be packed in a minute.”

Mara’s head appeared over the side of the craft. “Get him out of here,” she gestured at the body and then pointed at Han. “And get _him_ to Central before someone comes hunting.”

Lando’s deft fingers plucked at the fastener at his shoulder, then swung the satiny fabric off with a debonair twirl. “Are you sure it’s safe to fly?”

Mara slid down the side of the craft, landing with the precision of a sand-panther. “It won’t be pretty,” she allowed. “But it’s possible and we can’t lose them now.”

“Let me do it,” Luke interjected, unease taking root in his chest. He rushed on before she could protest. “If something goes wrong, I have more control of the Force than you do. I can maneuver the whole ship that way if I have to.

“Not happening!” Han slashed his hand through the air with a fierce scowl. “She wants to get herself killed, that’s her business. This ain’t our fight.”

It was, but there wasn’t time to explain that now.

“They’re expecting you in Race Central,” Mara reminded Luke calmly. “People will notice if you’re not there.” She gestured toward the ground where Lando was just finishing wrapping his cape around the mess that remained of Parham’s head. “You want to help me, help Calrissian hide the body.” She cast a disparaging look in Solo’s direction. “Despite _some people’s_ preferences, I have no intention of dying today.”

“Help me with this,” Lando said to Han.

“C’mon, Luke,” Solo demanded, gruffly. He helped Calrissian wrestle the body off the ground, another tone sounding as they hefted it. 

“That’s the second bell,” Mara said as the two men moved around the tail of the craft. “This place will be open any second.”

Impulsively, Luke leaned forward, framing her face in his hands, and kissed her - hard. “Be _careful_.” Then, because it was _her_ and he could all but taste the tang of adrenaline and anticipation on her tongue, “briikase oya, Jade.”

It was something he’d heard Talon say to her when he set her loose on missions. Threepio told him it translated to something like “happy hunting,” but with complex, incompletely translatable layers of respect, affection, and blessing. He must have used it right, though, because Mara’s lips curved in a small, ferine smile that sent most sane beings skittering for cover and sent a flush of want straight to Luke’s gut.

“You’re learning,” she purred, radiating approval. Rising up on her toes, she pecked a quick, satisfied kiss to his lips. 

Luke watched for just another second as she spun, grasping her skirt in one hand, and scaled back up the side of the ship. Then he darted after Han and Lando, pulling on the Force to lift Parham’s body from their grip. 

“I’ve got him, let’s go.”

 

* * *

  

Out of the corner of his eye, Luke saw Han double check himself for traces of blood as they hurried toward Almas Station’s ornately decorated Race Central. Beings streamed in all directions, bumping one another on every side as they hustled to their rented booths or jostled for the best positions in the open concourse. Lando made to split from them near the last juncture in the corridor, toward the reserved viewing booth he was to have shared with Mara.

On impulse, Luke snagged Calrissian’s elbow and pulled him along. At the security checkpoint, he pulled on the Force and murmured softly that Lando was clear to pass. Calrissian’s eyes darted sideways, wide and alert, and Luke knew the Baron knew what he’d done. He said nothing, though; just slipped into Luke’s assigned place back and to the left of Han’s elevated position without a word. Like the old smuggler he was, Solo jumped smoothly from the chaos of hiding Parham’s body into his official role on the platform.

With half an ear to what was happening around him and a cheery, interested look plastered on his face, Luke reached out in the Force. He sifted through the jumble of life and energy that thronged the station, searching for ill intent or more hints of danger to come. Almost at once, his attention was tugged toward the far end of the race course. The sensation of waiting had gotten stronger, honed into a sensation of sharply glinting greed. 

A skull-splitting horn sounded. The crowd bellowed. The ships were out the airlock. The race was on.

 

* * *

 

Luke stood transfixed. Like everyone else, his gaze was on the enormous holo-map tracking the racers’ positions that dominated the room. Unlike everyone else, his eyes were riveted to a single ship. Warning hummed in his ears as Mara’s Cannibalizer rocketed through the Spiral, a forty-meter-wide tunnel that ended abruptly in a 90-degree vertical turn.

Two pilots directly ahead of her didn’t pull up sharply enough. Groans and pained exclamations sounded from gamblers around the room as the ships splattered against the unforgiving rock wall. On the holo-map, ephemeral blue wisps dropped away from the impact point, the remains of ships and pilots alike fluttering to the tunnel floor, charred or perhaps still burning. Mara executed the maneuver perfectly. The tightness in Luke’s chest didn’t ease.

The crowd cheered as the first racers made it to the course’s two conjoined figure eights, inexplicably referred to as Skinning the Mynock. Pilots began to drop like Nanja flies when the Mynock opened into the Cavern of Teeth. Luke unconsciously leaned and jerked left and right around the nightmare range of stalactites and stalagmites that reared out of the darkness at tight, uneven intervals. Mara jinked and juked with him. One wingtip skimmed a stalactite, shaving off a shower of stone and Luke winced. Mara never slowed.

As Jade dove into the first of twelve viscously zig-zagging turns, the leading ships blasted out. At the edge of Luke’s awareness, the crowd chattered with excitement. This was a turning point – this was where the pilots had to make the split-second choice between hells: careen through a dense, volatile asteroid belt or a loop through the ominous pylons of Nub Saar before the final desperate streak back to the start line.

Of the first twelve pilots that shot forward, eight swung hard left, barreling into the asteroid field full throttle. Four spun right, arcing toward the shell of Nub Saar.

Beside Luke, Lando had turned his head, muttering into the comm mic concealed in his collar. “All our friends went straight for the station.”

Mara’s ship streaked out of the final corner and hurtled right.

Something dark swelled in the Force, rising and rippling out of the station like a red carpet of welcome unrolling. Luke grabbed Lando’s arm. “Call her off! Now!”

Lando barked into his collar, his fingers curling tight in the fabric in strain.

“Get her _out_!”

It was too late.

Five blips on the holo winked out of existence. There was a flash of shock and rage in the Force, distant but bright. Then there was nothing at all.


	2. Nub Saar

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “We should leave,” he said, knowing fully well that they wouldn’t. “Come back with reinforcements.”
> 
> “We should have told someone about this mission before we started it,” Mara dismissed the idea out of hand. “It’s far too late to play it safe, Farmboy.”

“Master Skywalker!” 

Luke veered toward the long, low-slung body of a Sprint-class rescue craft where a uniformed Mon Calamari pilot stood with a raised flipper, waving him over. Sprinters looked like nothing so much as extended, fortified railcars from the outside. A series of doors pocked both sides, but only one was open now, a wide, flat ramp extended and waiting.

“Thanks for letting me join you.” Luke jogged up the ramp and extended his hand to the pilot.

“Of course, Sir.” The alien had a firm grip and a brusque professionalism that Luke appreciated. “If you’ll come with me, we’ll be in the air momentarily.”

Luke’s comm went off halfway to the cockpit. “Skywalker,” he answered crisply, even though he knew who it was going to be.

“Luke,” Han said tersely. “Turn around and get off the ship.”

The pilot glanced over his shoulder at Luke. The Jedi shook his head and waved the man to keep going. “I can’t. 

“She’s not your apprentice anymore,” Han growled. “Not your responsibility. Let the race crews do their job.”

The co-pilot motioned to an empty seat behind his own and Luke dropped into it with a nod of thanks.

“Luke?” Han demanded. “Are you listening to me?”

“I hear you.” Luke watched lights across the med ship’s dashboard change colors. Standard indicators told him the hatches were sealed, the five-medic crew was buckled in and thrusters were coming alive. “But I have to go for her myself.”

Han swore. The ship started to lift and rotate, preparing to launch.

“Just enjoy the rest of the race,” Luke said hurriedly. “I’ll be back before the afterparty starts.”

He flicked the comm device off just before the rescue craft propelled itself through the magcon shield and into space. He doubted Han would be speaking to him by the afterparty. Yelling, possibly. Luke stifled a sigh and dug a finger under his knife-creased cravat, loosening it. It was too late to explain, now.

 _Later,_ he told himself. When they could leave the afterparty and have a private celebration of their own – him and Lando and Han and Mara. He could explain everything then – the mission, why they’d kept it secret. Mara. Imagining the look on his brother-in-law’s face, Skywalker swallowed a grimace. _He’ll come around,_ he thought, stubbornly. _He’ll have to._ It wouldn’t hurt to make sure there was plenty of Whyren’s to soften the blow, all the same.

Luke gave another sharp tug and the cravat came off. Glancing around, he wadded it up and stuffed it into a nook beside the control surfaces in front of his chair, trying not to think of how fast Leia would reassign Umolly to him if she knew. 

“Do you see them on the sensors?” he asked the pilots. 

“Life form readings on the station have never been reliable,” the Mon Calamari who had led him onboard answered over his shoulder. “Each racer has an embedded tracker designed to be visible in scans around the interference. Five ships went down, but only four tracking chips are registering.”

Of course. Mara’s ship had been tampered with. Luke leaned forward and stretched his neck, trying to see the holo the pilot brought up.

“All four are clustered over here.” With the tip of a webbed flipper, he indicated one of the station’s three pylons where four illuminated blips clustered together on the inside edge of the docking ring. “The last known contact point of the other one is over here.” The tip of his flipper flicked at a flashing marker hovering by itself just to the left of a different pylon.

“We’ll need to evacuate the survivors with confirmed sensor readings before investigating the loner,” the co-pilot observed, his fingers tapping at buttons as he made minute course adjustments. “Maybe we can raise the fifth while the medics are handling the first group.” 

“What if you dropped me off?” Luke asked. “Here, maybe.” He stood, bracing a hand on the back of the co-pilot’s seat to run a finger along the outline of what was marked as a cargo bay not far from where Mara’s ship had last registered. 

“I can trek in, find her and get us both back to that same point for pick up when you’re done with the others. I’m trained in emergency medical response,” he added. “And Jedi healing techniques. I’ll take full responsibility for her.”

The pilots exchanged glances. Luke clamped down on the urge to nudge their minds toward agreement. He let out a silent sigh of relief when the co-pilot unstrapped his crash harness. “Kix should have a medpack we can give you. Let’s get you kitted out.”

* * *

It took the pilots four tries to find an override that would open the massive cargo bay doors. The mag-con field behind the doors guttered worryingly but held. A brief scan showed everything to be decrepit but solid enough for the rescue ship to slip inside. The crew also insisted on double checking the air before letting Luke off.

“Radiation’s high,” Kix, the lead medic, reminded Luke before unlocking the ship’s main hatch. “The harvesters get most of it, but if we’re not back for you in an hour or less, take one of the potassium iodide pills in your pack. If she’s stable, give the racer one, too. Better safe than sorry.”

“Right,” Luke agreed, slinging the medpack’s straps over his shoulders and tightening the bracer straps across his chest. “I won’t forget.”

No stranger to hot drop-offs, Luke made a clean leap from the shuttle’s open door and immediately pelted away from the ship. He thumbed on the locator beacon as he ran, slapping it on the wall beside the cargo bay’s inner door when he reached it. It blinked green once, signaling that the already retreating Sprinter had it dialed in.

None of the security codes they’d given him to try opened the inner doors. He wasn’t surprised. Nub Saar had been abandoned for decades, its corpse suspended in false animation. Skeletal power feeds held it together just enough for the harvesters hunched around its periphery to continue gorging on the radiation emitted by its decomposing shell. It was a miracle anything worked at all.

Reaching into the pocket of his pants, he tucked his hand through a strategically placed slit and retrieved his lightsaber from the custom thigh holster he wore. It had a been a gift from Mara and, despite his initial doubts, it perfectly concealed the saber under the fashionably bloused fabric between his knee and hip. Sinking the blade into the door’s thick panel, he started to carve himself an entrance.

Without warning, a spark lit in Luke’s awareness. Mara was awake. Stretching his senses, he got a vague sensation of pain. Gritting his teeth, he pressed harder into the arc he was cutting and wished, not for the first time, that they had been able to forge a Force bond before she’d left the Academy. Even a simple training bond would have let him reach her clearly. But the damage done when her bond to the Emperor had snapped had left her unable to form new bonds. It was a cruel wound, intentionally inflicted, Skywalker thought, to keep others from claiming the Emperor’s prize for their own. He’d promised Mara they’d find a way around it when she came back. This only reinforced his resolve.

Luke dragged his blade through the last segment of the circle and shut it off. Clipping the saber to his belt, he lifted a hand and pushed with the Force. The chunk of blast door he’d carved free fell with a scrape and a clang. Swinging one leg and then the other through the opening, Luke emerged into an unimaginable landscape.

A quick glance behind him confirmed that the cargo bay remained as bland and empty as it had been a moment ago. Ahead, inexplicable jungle sprawled. The air was thick with a pungent tang that conjured up memories of med centers and battlefields.

The ground under his first tentative step was oddly spongy. How much soil would there have to be piled atop the station’s metal-plate floor for his foot to sink like that? Too much. His next steps felt sluggish, as if he were wading through something heavier than air.   _Like the Temple_ , he thought. The last breaths of dying beings, lingering where they fell. The ghosts of thousands of miners who’d died here in the station’s early days, perhaps?

But no, that wasn’t right – this was… oilier, somehow. Like the smoke of unholy incense hanging heavy in the air, clouding his senses. His eyes swept the bizarre terrain, still half expecting to see the faint outlines of the lingering dead. What he found instead made him grimace.

Just ahead to the left a knot of fat blue bulbs nodded on the ends of thick green stalks. Acid plants. He recognized syren plants, too - a patch of thick roots and stalks a bloody, mottled shade of crimson, topped with pairs of bright yellow petals tufts of snowy silken fibers. Luke frowned. Acid plants were native only to Hoth and Dagobah. All previous attempts to successfully transplant Syrens off Kashyyyk had failed– a blessing, considering the carnivorous flora were capable of snapping limbs off a full-grown Wookie. If the two he could name were any indication, the relatively short distance he had to travel wasn’t going to be a quick jaunt.

Determination settled in his chest. Mara was in this mess somewhere, alone and injured. Unlit lightsaber at the ready, Luke started forward into the primeval bracken.

* * *

He stumbled over one of the Cannibalizer’s ion fission engines first. It was crumpled, charred and lodged in the base of a blackened, thick-trunked tree. The swampy ground sucked at his boots as he trekked around the mess, carefully avoiding a knot of unidentifiable, fiercely wriggling vines. 

Pushing through another clump of damp, hanging branches he nearly collided with the jagged remains of the snub-fighter’s nose where it protruded through a mangled portion of wall. It took him several minutes to find a safe place to cut through and backtrack on the other side of the wall to find the rest of the smoking hull.

“Mara?”

Violent retching sounds led him around the hulk of the ruined ship. Mara squatted on hands and knees, gagging and coughing. Blood trickled from her temple and her bare arms were flecked with cuts, burns, and gore. Strands of hair had come loose from her elegant braid, her cape was gone, and the hem of her dress was shredded around her calves.

“Mara!” Luke dropped to his knees at her side and hurriedly unbuckled the medpack, slinging it to the ground beside him.

“I’m fine.” Mara dragged the back of a shaky hand across her mouth.

“Given the state of your ship, I don’t think I’m going to take your word for that.” Snatching the portable med scanner from its pocket he flipped it open and ran it over her.

“Minor concussion,” she listed off, almost as quickly as the device. “Bruised ribs and a sprained ankle. Nothing to stop us from catching up with the targets.”  She pushed herself up on her knees, teetering when she lifted her head. “We need to get moving.”

“The _targets_ ,” Luke dropped backward until he sat instead of knelt, hooked a hand around her waist, and pulled her forward until she was tucked between his legs. “- are coming to us. So you can sit for a minute and let me do something about your head.”

“What do you mean _coming to us_?”

He explained briefly about the rescue ship as he cradled her head between his hands. He dipped into the Force, snapping his head to the side at the feel of another presence. He reached toward it, but it scudded away, vanishing in seconds.

“What is it?” Mara’s head swiveled to follow his gaze.

“Our friend was poking around,” he murmured. “Gone now.”

“Antisocial bastard, isn’t he?” she muttered. 

“Hmm,” Luke hummed in agreement, words lost as he concentrated on pulling the Force through himself and channeling it into her. Picturing the swollen mass of her brain, the pulsing, pounding blood and the deep internal bruising, he guided the healing energy to where she needed it. He caught a sensation of relief as the pain receded and he backed off, pulling his sense fully back into himself. Dropping his hands to her elbows, he examined her arms.

“There are bacta patches in the medpack.” 

Mara shook her head. “Just give me a sani-wipe – most of the blood is Parham’s. It’s all over the cockpit. I covered the seat with my cape, but there wasn’t time to do anything about the control surfaces.” She met his eyes, her expression tight. “We should get moving.”

“I agree.” Handing her a sani-wipe, Luke started re-securing the medkit. “There’s more going on here than we expected.”

As she sterilized the wounds on her arms and cleaned off the worst of the mess, he sketched a verbal map for her of the terrain he’d encountered on the way in. When she was finished, she swept her skirt to the side. The dress’s design allowed for only a single thigh holster, so her blaster was taped at the small of her back, concealed by the ruching and, originally, her cape. Discarding the tape, she let her skirt drop back into place and motioned for Luke to lead. She fell in half a step behind and to his right in her preferred classic Imperial formation.

With Mara beside him again, Luke felt sharper - clearer headed, despite the dense atmosphere. “It’s strange that there’s no fauna. Insects,” he amended. “But I haven’t seen anything larger.”

“Flora’s like a Hutt’s Pleasure Garden,” Mara grumbled. 

“Gardulla’s Garden.” Luke’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “You know about that?”

Mara was silent a minute, the air around her hazing with the shades of ugly memories. “I had to go once. Training exercise.”

The terseness of her tone told Luke everything he needed to know about the experience. He waited, knowing that however much he wanted to offer it, she didn’t want comfort. As expected, she refocused quickly.

“The question,” Mara said irritably, as they approached the pickup point, “is what this mess,” she gestured around them, “has to do with stolen amulets and a Force user with deplorable manners.”

“They might not be related,” he pointed out. “The station is pretty big, and the medics said that most readings – including life readings – are unreliable at best.”

“We heard that too, and verified it,” Mara confirmed. “Readings fluctuate, but it’s all random – there are no discernable patterns of movement and the changes don’t map to any known environmental models.”

“So, it’s possible that our friend could be holed up in some corner of this place without whoever did this knowing about it,” Luke mused.

“Possible,” Mara opined, grimly. “He’s clearly got experience staying under the radar because I didn’t feel him at all until he’d already snatched my ship.”

Recrimination tainted the air and Luke stopped picking his way through the muddy ground and twisted to look at her. “Your Force connection is still healing,” he reproved. “And you barely got any training before -,” he stumbled over the words. “Before you had to go.”

“Before I killed Durron and brought the Senate down on the Academy,” Mara supplied bluntly, her eyes meeting his and her mouth flattening into a hard line. “Created a rift between you and Solo.”

Luke fully turned at that, stepping in close to her.  “You saved millions of lives.” He reached out to stroke her soot-smudged cheek gently with a thumb. “If you hadn’t used the self-destruct on the Headhunter’s beckon call Kyp would have destroyed Carida and Exar Kun would have been loose in the galaxy. The cost would have been incalculable. Everyone else has accepted that. Han will, too.”   

“I’m not apologizing,” Mara scowled. “I’m _complaining_. If your damn -.”

The station rocked violently. Suddenly off his feet, Luke slammed into the base of a huge tree. Pain shot through the back of his shoulder and trailing vines scratched at his face. Warning flared in the Force and he threw himself sideways just in time to avoid the caustic splatter projected by a half-hidden knot of acid plants. Luke grabbed for branches with his free hand as his feet slid on the slick ground, trying to stay upright and out of the hissing, sizzling patch of ground where the acid was dissolving everything it touched. He’d just found his footing when the air pressure plummeted and a familiar whine kicked up.

“The mag-con field must have gone!” Mara’s shout came from his left. “We have to close the blast doors!”

Every plant slanted sharply sideways, pulled by the vacuum of space ripping through the now-open cargo bay and its holed blast doors.  Syren plants lunged in all directions like Endorian rearing spiders, snapping up debris as it howled by.

“I cut through them!” Luke yelled back, tightening his grip on his lightsaber hilt as freezing air ripped at him. “We’ll have to use the next set in!”

He twisted against the vortex, scanning the walls rapidly, trying to map where he was in the corridor through the obscuring tangle of vegetation. Something moved behind him – pressure coiled up his left wrist. Startled, he glanced back. Then did a double take. A vine that hadn’t been there a minute ago had slithered down the branch he clung to and encircled his left wrist. As he watched, it extended its tip and latched on further up his sleeve, hitching itself up the inside of his forearm.

“What the -?”

“I’ll get the panel open!”

Luke snapped his eyes off the vine and toward a flash of gold at the corner of his vision. His heart lurched into his throat when he realized Mara was hurtling weightlessly down the corridor. At seemingly the last second, she flung her hands out and caught the lip of the hatch. With a grunt of effort, she heaved herself against the suction, flattening the upper half of her body against the inside of the wall, suspended with the left side of her body parallel to the jungle floor. 

“Mara!” Luke shoved his lightsaber onto its clip on his belt and flung his right hand out. Pressing hard with the Force, he anchored Mara against the wall, his heart pounding.

“Skywalker!” she yelled. “I have to _move_!”  
  
She had a point. Still… “If I have grey hair before Leia I’m blaming you!” 

“If that’s what finally makes you look distinguished, you’ll owe me!”

Through the whirlwind, Luke shot her a half smile and relaxed his hold fractionally – just enough so she could start crawling forward. He kept a secure mental grip on her, just in case, but had to split his attention because the vine at his wrist snaked up over his elbow and cinched painfully. He eyed it critically. He could cut it, but it would be tricky. The buffeting air made it too risky to try to singe it off anywhere it touched his arm. He’d have to cut it up past his hand, but he couldn’t afford to sever the branch that was anchoring him until the blast doors closed.

Casting a glance in Mara’s direction to check her progress, he found her aiming blaster at a point on the wall ahead of her. She must have found the control panel for the doors.

That meant - something spiny poked underneath Luke’s arm. Sucking in his breath, he whirled back to find the vine attempting to latch around his shoulder. Snatching his lightsaber off his belt he split his attention in the Force another degree to ground himself against the movement around him and ignited the blade. With a quick forward lunge, he nicked the vine just past his fingers with the tip of the blade.

A shot rang out and starbursts of sparks sizzled through leaves and moss. A curse. More shots.

The leading edge reared back from his shoulder, its grip on his arm giving. Snapping the lightsaber off, Luke moved to put it back on his belt. Before he got the hilt back across his body, four new vines shot out of the tree and latched onto his limbs. In the space of two breaths he was trussed up like a stuffed tip-yip ready for roasting.

_Oh, for Force sake!_

There was an enormous crack and then several reverberating clangs as the panel cover snapped off under Mara’s assault and clattered against the walls as it was sucked away.

“Your turn, Farmboy!”

Closing his eyes, Luke pulled deeply on the Force. Trusting their lives to it, he opened his eyes and reached out. Wrapped his mind around the lever and _wrenched_. At the same time, he swiveled his right wrist, angling the hilt of his lightsaber away from his body.

As he had on Jabba’s sail barge, bound by the cable of Fett’s rope gun, he re-lit the blade and twitched it sharply to the side, slicing through two of the vines. With the tiny extra spectrum of movement their loss gave him he jabbed his arm forward a notch and swept the blade back up in an arc, severing the other two. There was a creak - like wood straining – and, for a stomach-flipping second, he was weightless as the grip of the vines gave way and the vacuum dug into him with icy talons.

An agonized shriek split the air as ancient gears lurched into shambling motion. Heavy blast doors pitched shut with a resounding _boom_. Everything gave way. Luke instinctively bent his knees, years of combat training allowing him to hit the ground on his feet in a controlled crouch instead of flat on his back like a sack of topatos. Beyond the blast doors, the walls gave an eerie groan as oxidized metal bent and warped under the pressure of decompression - but everything held. For the moment.

Shoving upright, Luke darted away from the grasping vines and toward Mara. She’d come out of her own fall in a roll and was pushing to her feet when he reached her. Mud coated her arms and splotched across her ruined gown. One of her feet was bare, but his searching eyes found no new wounds.

“Nicely done.”

 Mara didn’t answer. She was staring at her hands, her expression drawn. Her shields battened down suddenly and Luke’s shoulders tensed.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Bringing a hand to her face, Mara sniffed. Her nostrils flared. Spinning, she backtracked a few steps. Sticking out her still-shoed foot, she started kicking at the soft ground. Luke followed, eyes scouring the ground for the source of her concern. The soil was significantly thinner here, he noted – disturbed by the turbulence and then her fall.

She pulled her foot back. Bile rose in Luke’s throat. The unmistakable mottled ivory curve of a humanoid skull poked through the dirt where she’d been scraping. Bits of flesh and scales still adhered to the bone. The thin root of a nearby tree protruded from the arch of a vacant eye socket.

 _No fauna,_ Luke thought nauseously. _No fauna because the plants are devouring everything._

“That wasn’t a miner,” Mara spat, side-stepping.

Ice crackled under Luke’s skin as he swept his eyes down the corridor, across the too-deep, too-soggy ground. How much of the station’s outer ring was jungle like this - fertilized with the bodies of the station’s victims?

“We need to move. _Now._ ”

“We’re not getting out that way.” Mara nodded toward the meter-thick heavily-rusted doors that cut off their original route. “Give me your jacket.”

Curious and too anxious to be moving to argue, Luke unbuckled the medkit and handed it to her while he shrugged out of his tux jacket. Mara rooted inside the pack, coming up with a sani-wipe and a roll of spacer’s tape. She closed up the kit and handed all three items back to him when he offered her the coat.

He took them obediently, watching as she yanked off her remaining slipper and chucked it into the vines. With efficient, practiced moves she tore the thick fabric into strips and wrapped them around her feet and ankles, halfway up her calves. Then, reclaiming the roll of tape she’d taken from the kit, she wound lengths of tape over the fabric into makeshift boots. 

When she was finished, Luke traded her the tape for the sani-wipe. “Remind me to have you give me lessons in how to do that sometime,” he said, stashing the tape back in the kit and resettling it in place against his back while she cleaned the smell of decomposition off her hands and arms and wiped at her face.

“If you want me to rip your clothing up – or off - all you have to do is say so.” Mara quipped, tossing the wipe into the mud.

“I’ll take you up on that,” Luke stepped forward and pulled her against him, his arms around her waist. “When we get back to my room later.”

They shouldn’t linger – it wasn’t safe. Nothing here was. But she warm and steady against him, the bright timbre of her energy soothing. He couldn’t quite make himself pull away.

“And right now?” she prompted. There was a predatory gleam in her eyes as she ran her hands up his arms to rest on his shoulders.

“We _should_ leave,” he said, knowing fully well that they wouldn’t. “Come back with reinforcements.”

“We _should_ have told someone about this mission before we started it,” Mara dismissed the idea out of hand. “It’s far too late to play it safe, Farmboy.” She cocked her head. “You think we need to have a word with our Force-strong friend.”

“I do. That magcon field going wasn’t an accident – I’d bet all my credits on it.”

“Antisocial _and_ rude,” Mara scoffed, derisively. She pursed her lips, thinking. “We can backtrack to a cross-over bridge. Cut across the central ring towards Pylon Two where the other racers went in.” 

Luke nodded. “We must have passed the cross-over entrance but I didn’t see it. You’re better at scouting than I am, though. Why don’t you take the lead?”

Stepping back out of his arms, Mara hiked up her skirt and pulled her lightsaber from the holster strapped to her thigh. Not his father’s - it hadn’t been safe for her to carry that openly after Kyp and it had been too bulky to conceal well. This one he’d made for her himself. Plated in songsteel with an Ilum-crystal heart, it was slender and deft, with a blade as gold as Naboo sunshine. A betrothal token worthy of her. A perfect one, too, she’d joked – considering she was likely to spend the rest of her life wielding it saving his hide.

Impulsively, Luke kissed her. She smiled against the kiss, opening her mouth to him just long enough to tease before slipping out of reach again. Then, lightsaber hilt in hand, she stalked off down the corridor in the direction from which they’d come.


	3. Central Ring

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Soul-stealers aren’t supposed to exist,” Mara growled, her fists pressing hard into the tops of her thighs. “Bonds, mind-links – you can… break people, wreak minds, possess bodies, but stealing souls? That’s the realm of myth, Skywalker.”

“Over there!” Luke dodged.

Stinging heat blossomed across his cheek as a spiked vine-tip sliced across under his eye. The back of his neck burned with unbroken warning from the Force. Too many threats in all directions. No way to tell -.

“Go!” Mara yelled. “Watch for a feeder plant!”

Luke flicked his wrist, his blade a wall of green as it disemboweled four, meter-tall shells. They spewed pus and he gagged at the stench.  “What’s a -? _Arrugh_!”

His feet flew out from under him, pain lancing up his legs as a thorn encrusted vine coiled around his shins and dug in. Shards of lichenous shell, bits of bark and splintered vines shredded the back of his shirt and gouged at his back as whatever it was hauled him across the ground. More vines snaked toward him at impossible speeds and he swung to both sides feverishly, hacking half-blind. If they got him pinned down, this was _over_.

Ahead of him across the debris-littered mud a thick mass of pine-green fronds loomed. They gaped open, a giant, tooth-lined maw working in eagerness as he hurtled toward it.

“Oh, no!”

“Luke! Shield!”

His concentration was dangerously split already but he did, throwing up an absolutely basic barrier of thickened air between himself and the salivating plant.

Blaster shots – three of them, muffled through his barrier. Chunks of the feeder plant blew off and Luke used his newly-bought seconds to curl upward, slicing his feet free. He hissed in pain as he wrenched the vines out of flesh – they’d gone _straight through_ the thin, fine bantha-leather of his dress boots. He flung the dead cording away. Refocused. Leapt to his feet. They had to get to -.

The doors pitched open with a violent hiss. Luke turned, hope cresting – “aagh!”

Heat seared through his eyes – his brain. Not pain – not exactly – but a knifing white light that obliterated everything. Unbalanced, he stumbled backward. The uneven ground gave beneath his feet and he staggered, hitting the thick trunk of a tree. Bark scraped the back of his hand, bloodied his fingers as he pressed them into the gnarled bark for balance – he couldn’t let go of his lightsaber and his other hand was pressed against his eyes.

Crimson flooded across the bleached landscape of Luke’s vision like blood spilling across a marble floor. It gushed from his left and he swung blindly in that direction. “Mara? Mara!”   

Black cracks formed in the bloody soup of Luke’s sight. They sped along, meeting and branching out – _a hand_. A bony, char-black claw stretched from somewhere near where the doorway should have been to where he’d last seen Mara. Cursing himself for an idiot, Luke gave up on his eyes - switched entirely to Force Sight. It wasn’t a strength but he knew enough to get by.

The red evaporated as the world went translucent grey-green, peopled by shapes and auras. The bronzed-amber that was Mara hovered off the ground, contorting in agony as something – a thin black rod floating in the doorway – pulled threads of her essence out of her core and spun them in a long, fine rope. The rope wound and knotted around itself into a glowing ball at the rod’s base.

There was another aura – vibrant ruby - beside the rod. It shimmered with excitement – clear, carnal and hungry.

 _You can’t have her._ The thought was all-consuming and Luke moved on instinct. Igniting his blade, he launched himself at the ruby aura. It was man-shaped, perhaps a little taller than he and for all that it clearly had the Force, it didn’t seem to sense his attack before it happened because the response was delayed. Its own blade – cherry red – barely caught his in time.

“Stop this!” Luke demanded, spinning and striking again. “Let her go.”

“I’m afraid -,” the man hammered three short, hard but clumsy blows against Luke’s blade, “you don’t – understand!” His voice was cultured but as brash as his ungainly fighting style. “I must have her.”

Luke batted away another blow and drove the man back, resolve hardening his own strikes. “I can’t let you.”

One shot. Another. Mara’s blaster, behind him. Blaster bolts winged off the rod, still floating unmoved at his left. His sight flooded with red again as something popped and Mara gave a strangled cry.

 _No!_ Mara – _the rod_. Luke aimed a Force-assisted swing at his opponent’s blade, hitting hard enough that the man fell backward with a shout, blade extinguishing as he tumbled. Spinning on his heel, Luke arced his blade through the rod.

It didn’t break. Panting, he gaped a split second, then attacked again. The thing swiveled, as if it had a life of its own. It stopped drawing energy from Mara and focused on him. Luke gasped as he felt something puncture his chest – four dark points of fire embedding themselves like krayt teeth in his ribs. Darkness raked him and his soul began to bleed. His vision blurred.

He lashed out, desperately, but his blows did nothing. His blade ghosted through the staff as it weren’t there.

“No! No, stop! They cannot be mingled!”

Luke struggled against the pull, wracking his rapidly clouding mind for something – anything -.

“Let him go,” Mara’s voice was hoarse. “Or I’ll split your skull like a meiloorun.”

Luke wobbled, barely keeping his feet or his consciousness, fear gripping his chest as Mara’s amber shape faced off with the unknown ruby-hued man.

“Do something,” the man snarled. “We must have her intact.”

Distantly, Luke felt his own confusion mirrored in Mara. Then, with a silent _bang_ the rod disappeared. Abruptly released, Luke pitched forward. He landed hard on his knees, unable to even to comprehend what he felt in the Force as the staff vanished – folding, _power,_ an indescribable wrongness.

The man cursed and took off, metal flooring grates rattling and clanging as he darted right down the habitat ring.

“Luke,” Mara’s voice was rough, her breath warm on his ear as she slid an arm around him and tugged. “Up. Come on.”

He levered himself upright with a grunt. His head spun. He curved his left arm around her shoulders, as much for balance as in a need to be physically touching her – to feel her beside him.

“Close your eyes,” she commanded as they staggered forward. “They won’t heal from Blinding if you keep them open.” She answered his next question before he could ask. “I saw Inquisitors do it. Years ago. Rare but effective.”

“Are you hurt?” he asked, putting out his right forearm to brace against the door frame as they left the jungle behind. His right hand still clutched the hilt of his blade. He wouldn’t put it back on his belt until he knew they were safe.

“I’ll be fine.”

Luke’s gut clenched at the thin, stretched pinch in her voice. “Sweetheart -.”

“A few broken bones in my hand,” she cut him off, sharply. “That thing blew out the grip of my blaster.”

That wasn’t all of it – he _knew_ that tone. Knew, as well, that she wouldn’t – _couldn’t_ – let down her guard enough to tell him any more while their lives depended on her control.

“I can take the edge off the pain.”

“Focus on fixing your vision,” she ordered as they picked their way through a ruined section of jungle-less crossover bridge. Her shoulder dipped and her body twisted, taking him with her as she ducked pocked plates that hung drunkenly from the ceiling and deep, dripping holes in the grated flooring. “And see if you locate the Sprinter. It should be ahead and to the right – not too far.”

Luke let her steer them left when they reached the habitat ring. Opposite the direction their assailant had gone and toward their intended rendezvous point. He stretched his senses out ahead of them. A bright patch lit up at the edge of his search.

“Something’s happening,” he announced grimly. “Fear – surprise. I can’t tell what else.”

“Nothing good,” Mara grumbled. “Careful,” she added. “This section must have been hit hard by the radiation storms – everything’s loose.”

“Right.”

Giving his body entirely to Mara’s guidance, Luke let himself sink halfway into a Force trance, doing what he could to fix his eyes and amping up the pain suppression on his legs. When he risked opening his eyes again, there was a moment of disorientation as blurry eyesight overlapped with Force Sight. He let the Force Sight go and his vision cleared. It wasn’t back up to normal but it was enough.

No – maybe it wasn’t. “Did something just move up -?”

“Shavit!” Mara stepped away from him, igniting her blade.

More shadows moved just ahead. Luke thumbed on his lightsaber, the reassuring hum balancing out the creeping unease at his spine that whispered _nothing should move like that._

“Aim for their heads,” Mara snapped, tightly.

“What are -?” He didn’t get to finish the question.

Four _things_ scuttled out of the interior crossover bridge. Backlit by the wash of light from the wedge-shaped section of station where the bridge met the central core, they were grotesque and unidentifiable. They lurched forward, skittering on four twisted limbs. One scooted up a wall, crawling upside down overhead. The others fanned out, rushing them head-on. When they got close, Luke almost wished he hadn’t fixed his sight because he was never going to get the image of them out of his memory.

They had been racers. Hollow, bloody holes yawned where their eyes should have been and their heads cocked at impossible angles. Pink-flecked froth ringed slavering mouths, splattering off dislocated jaws as they skittered unevenly forward. Mara swung. They lurched away from her bade, then jumped back at her. Uncoordinated but vicious, they were _fast_ – too fast.

Luke tracked the one overhead, waited until just the right second, then _yanked_ with the Force. The creature howled as it was ripped from its path and flung. Luke’s blade bisected its head as it passed and it splattered against the opposite wall in a spray of brain matter and slivers of bone. Over the sound of the flashing sabers he could make out shouts and blaster bolts – he guessed the Sprinter crew had its own fight.

Putting his back to Mara’s, Luke repeated the pulling motion, taking a second creature with relative ease while she finished off one of her own. She let him have the third and then, without speaking, they ducked down the crossover toward the rest of the battle.

* * *

With their help, it was over quickly. It was only when they’d been hustled inside the ship and everything locked down, however, that Luke started to realize the full extent of the horror of those brief, chaotic exchanges.

“They were dead,” Aubrahay, one of the medics - a Zygerrian - kept repeating. His pointed ears twitched in distress, clawed hands kneading at his thighs as he sat, shell-shocked and shaky, on a bench seat in the ship’s medbay. “I checked myself – all of them. _Dead_. And Nealayd and Jordesh…” he trailed of, shuddering.

“The racers were dead when we arrived,” the Mon Calamari Captain explained gruffly to Luke. “You saw their ships.”

He had seen them – melted together and lodged in the station’s outer wall upside down like a giant chunk of neon glob candy. Baffling. Awful.

Luke leaned back on his hands so that he could keep eye contact with the Captain while a human medic – his shipsuit read _Oadlcla_ – spray splinted one of his ankles and the opposite shin. The vines had done more damage than he’d realized.

“Any idea how they got like that?” he asked.

The Captain shook his head. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“We pulled them out,” the co-pilot Maxtyll said. “Had them laid out on float stretchers, ready to load – so we could head to meet to you – and they…” His face went funny. “Got… up.”

“Reanimated,” Mara supplied, bluntly.

Luke glanced over his left shoulder. She was on a table just behind and a little to the side of him. Her left hand was propped in a support cradle while Kix cleaned out the open wounds and sterilized the burns. Her right eye was mottled red where blood vessels had burst and scans had showed some kind of unidentifiable mitochondrial damage. Her dress was torn and unraveling and every part of her was streaked with mud and gore. Her expression was as clear and fierce, though, and he took strength from it.

“Reanimated?” Aubrahay repeated, incredulously. “You can’t be serious.”

Mara glared at him. “You have a better explanation?”

“This isn’t a cheap holo-thriller!” Aubrahay shouted, eyes wild. “Bodies don’t just _wake up_ and _eat people_.”

Luke felt a wave of compassion for the man. Maxtyll had whispered to him as they hurried into the ship that he’d been close with Nealayd, one of the medics snatched and transformed by the creatures they’d faced. He tried to imagine Wedge or Hobbie mutated like that - how he’d feel if they’d come back for him that way and he’d had to put them down.

Mara pressed her lips together, biting back a sharp retort and glanced at Luke, cocking her head.

He got the message. “Captain, you’re familiar with Jedi. Do you know anything about Sith?”

“Not really,” he sounded puzzled. “I’ve heard they’re a sort of ‘anti-Jedi,’ prone to destruction and carnage. Only rumors, though. Spacers’ tales and the like.”

“That’s not a bad analogy,” Luke said.

It would do no good to get into the finer points now. At Oadlcla’s instruction, he swung his legs over the side of the bed, sat up fully and discarded the shredded remains of his tux shirt. The pants had been cut off of him and lay in pieces on the floor. Leia was going to kill him.

“Eight months ago, I was contacted by the Curator of the Coruscant Museum. Several artifacts had been stolen from the Hall of Sith. No one was sure what they did – if anything – but he was concerned. I was… busy, with other things and couldn’t investigate right away. A few standard weeks later, there were similar thefts from the Museum of the Old Republic on Centares. I asked Mara to look into it on my behalf. She’s a skilled tracker.” He smiled at her, unable to hide his pride.

Outwardly, Mara betrayed nothing, her face remaining set in grave concentration. Her sense warmed, though, bumping against his in reassuringly. He didn’t let himself think about how badly he longed for a proper bond – longed for her to heal enough to train and refine her abilities.

“A contact,” Mara picked up, avoiding Mirax’s name out of ingrained professional discretion, “traced some of the missing artifacts when they were exchanged under the guise of an art sale. The short version is that all the evidence pointed to an Imperial industrialist with connections to the Noble houses collecting objects related to Sith history. Four artifacts turned up in the possession of individuals scheduled to fly in the Eskaron Race.”

“We hoped to track them to the source,” Luke explained, flinching when the medic dabbed bacta gel on the small, round scorch marks the claw had left on his chest. “But we had an encounter of our own on the way over.” He gave them a short, generously edited version of events. He changed gratefully into a pair of clean, loose medical pants and a matching top that Oadlcla offered him while he spoke. “Obviously,” he concluded, “there’s far more going on than we were led to believe.”

“And you think one of these… Sith… is responsible for what happened to my crew?” the Captain asked.

“Reanimating corpses is a known Sith ability,” Mara said, her tone clinical and detached.

He glanced at her and saw Kix finishing wrapping her hand. Moving to the man’s side, he held out his hand. “I’d like to apply the bacta, if that’s all right.”

Kix looked him over, then handed him the tube without a word. Gently, Luke turned Mara a little away from the others. They’d both been handled by combat medics enough that modesty wasn’t much of a concern, but the Sith’s attitude toward her had touched off a particularly fierce possessive streak. He needed it to be him touching her right now. Needed to not see someone else baring her skin, someone else’s hands on her breasts.

“What do we do?” Maxtyll asked, bewildered. “We can’t fight a Sith! We’re not equipped to fight _anybody_. Not really! We can’t even get a message off for help because of the radiation interference!”

“You’re going to leave,” Mara said, flatly. She lifted her uninjured right hand and shoved the frayed shoulder of her dress down, peeling the formerly-brilliant fabric to her waist.

Luke grabbed a wipe from the pack Kix had left on the bed and gently cleaned the area around the burns – four of them, the same as he now bore. One of the marks scorched across a ring of pinked skin near the tip of her left breast. His heart clenched. The Sith’s mark seared over the love bite he’d sucked into her skin only hours ago. It felt like a challenge – a threat - and he automatically dropped into a simple meditative breathing pattern to keep fear and fury at bay.

“Are you sure that’s wise?” Maxtyll looked dubious.

Discarding the wipe, Luke squeezed a generous amount of bacta gel onto a fingertip and daubed at Mara’s fair skin. She leaned into the touch, her eyes half closing – her only concession that she might want to be touched as much as he needed to touch her. Luke let himself take it as comfort and felt his churning emotions level out just slightly.

“You can take a message back to Race Central,” he told the Lieutenant. “Let them know that the station isn’t safe and they should keep everyone away until we’ve contained the threat.”

“How will we know?” the Captain inquired. “If you can’t get comm us to say you’ve achieved your task?”

“He’s getting messages out,” Mara said, matter-of-factly. “When we’ve taken him down, we’ll use whatever method he’s been using.”

The medics’ skepticism was clear enough that Luke couldn’t help but smile. “It’ll be all right,” he assured them. “We have experience with this sort of thing.”

Mara snorted softly. Impulsively, Luke ran a cleaning wipe across a spot on her temple and then pressed a kiss to it.

“With respect, Master Skywalker, your injuries -.”

“We’ll be fine,” Luke said firmly. “You should get ready to go. The sooner you go, the safer you’ll be.”

“Please avail yourself of whatever you can find that you think will assist in your efforts,” the Captain said, seriously, after a moment. “Lieutenant, prepare the ship for take-off.”

* * *

When the others had dispersed to the front of the ship to see to their duties, Luke helped Mara out of the rest of her dress and into a clean pair of medical scrubs like his own. Then he pulled her into the back corner of the med bay, down onto one of the bench seats.

“Sweetheart.” Keeping his voice low, he slid his right hand under her tunic and pressed his palm to the base of her ribs. He probed gently. “How bad is -,” he cut off, his breath leaving him in a rush when he found the wound. _“Fierfek.”_

His Force sense traced the edges, his stomach turning. Whatever that thing was, it had cored into her like a drill-spike splitting a ship’s hull. The spiralized puncture pulsed under his touch - hot, inflamed and raw. The stinging pain lingering under his own ribs was a pinprick by comparison.

Mara’s hands fisted in her lap. “It’s like Endor,” she ground out through stiff lips. “A piece of me – ripped out -,” she caught her breath, her pain washing over him. “I have to get it back,” she blurted, anger surging on the heels of her agony. “I’m damaged enough – I can’t even -.”

“We’ll get it back.” Luke framed her face in his hands, leaned his forehead against hers. “We will – together.”

“Soul-stealers aren’t supposed to exist,” Mara growled, her fists pressing hard into the tops of her thighs. “Bonds, mind-links – you can… break people, wreak minds, possess bodies, but _stealing_ _souls_? That’s the realm of myth, Skywalker.”

“Except that we know what we felt.”

“How bad did it get you?” Mara’s hand rucked up his shirt, her crippled sense trying to search for the scars on his aura.

“Here.” He moved her hand, pressing it against the laceration to his sense of himself. “Minor – practically a scratch. Because of you.” He stroked a thumb against her temple.

“ _Stupid,”_ she hissed, unwilling to accept his praise. “How could I have misread things _this badly_? There was no evidence -.” She stopped suddenly. “A trap. This whole thing is a trap.”

The Sith’s words rang in Luke’s memory. _I must have her. We must have her intact._ “They want you,” he said, knowing it with the certainty he’d known Vader was telling the truth on Bespin. Cold seeped through his body.

“Why?” Mara demanded. “What could they possibly want with -.” She trailed off, her expression scrunching in concentration. “Soul stealing. They have to want my soul, my body or both - separately. What did he say – the Sith? Something about our souls not mingling?”

Luke nodded, unable to speak past the tightness of his throat as he followed her line of thinking, his mind racing to ugly conclusions.

“My soul, then, probably.” Mara’s voice was detached, again. “Bait?” She hazarded. “An energy source? You -,” she shot upright. “You should go. Go back to Almas Station with the ship. Call Leia – get cruisers. If the worst happens -.”

“I’m not leaving you.” Luke was on his feet, reaching for her.

“I won’t be a pawn again!” Mara pulled against his hold, determination flushing her aura deep bronze. “If I can’t get myself back, you have to kill me – take out the whole station. Stop this here. You promised -.”

Luke planted his feet and spun them, crowding her body against the wall with his, stilling her. He dipped his head, his eyes meeting and holding hers unflinchingly. “I know what I promised,” he said, low and serious. “And I know what you promised, too.”

The silence stretched between them.

“I’m not worth your life, Farmboy.”

“You are to me.”

She stared up at him, struggle written all over her pale, strained face. Luke didn’t look away. For the hundredth time, he mentally cursed the Emperor to every agony the Sith hells had on tap for teaching Mara that she was expendable. For embedding the idea so deeply in her mind it was a fight to see past it even now.

“Promise me again.”

Luke held his ground. This was the compromise that had brought her to his bed in the first place – he knew the steps like a dance, and he was prepared to take them over and over until they wore new grooves into her understanding of herself – even if it took the rest of his life. “You first.”

Her head dropped forward against his chest. “I promise,” she said thickly. “That we’ll be a team.” She hesitated. Luke waited. “Equals. A bonded pair. In life…. and death.”

Luke caressed her battered aura with his own. “I promise,” he said, steadily, “that I will see us both dead by my own hand before we kneel to anyone but each other.”

Mara let out a shaky breath and lifted her head. “Kiss me.”

Luke planted his hands on the wall on either side of her head, shutting out everything but the two of them. He’d meant the kiss to be long and slow and tender, but she parted her lips in unspoken request and then he’d lifted her. Her legs wrapped around his waist and he pressed her into the wall, devouring her, his arms fiercely tight around her, his senses suffuse with her. He wouldn’t lose her. He couldn’t.

They were both gasping when he finally – reluctantly – pulled back enough for them to breathe. Mara’s smooth, smoky amber sense was wreathed in gold, the predatory edge back in her voice when she managed, “it’s still a trap.”

He grinned at her, that cheeky, recklessly optimistic grin she loudly proclaimed to hate but never failed to respond to. “Did you have anything better planned for the next couple hours?”

Her answering smile was wicked. “Now that you mention it, no.” She nudged him and he stepped back, easing her feet to the floor. “Let’s go teach our rude Sith friend some manners.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you want to see a drill spike core through something, it's at the start of the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThXT8TAjZXA


	4. Core

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _I love you._   
>  _Prove it._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PLEASE NOTE THE UPDATED TAGS.
> 
> I know this was rated mature to begin with but I've added some specific tags in light of revisions to the latest chapters. Please check them out before continuing... I'm not here to traumatize anybody. (Well, I mean, I AM, obviously, but only if that's what you're here for! Not by accident.)
> 
> ALSO: please note that the bad guy(s) get creepy with Mara here, guys. I didn't tag for it because I couldn't come up with an appropriate tag that didn't mischaracterize things, but don't be surprised when you run into it, okay? Thanks.

****On a whim, Luke tried the controls for the blast door without keying in any of the access codes they’d been given to try. To his surprise, it gave a tortured squeal and immediately began to grind open. The sound – and something else, incorporeal but very much _there_ \- grated across his nerves, leaving them prickly and jangled.

“I was hoping I would get to meet you!”

The cheerful, almost childlike greeting was bright and loud - discordant in the murky darkness. Orange emergency lights flickered at uneven intervals. The twitching light revealed a tall, lean body in patchy flashes of yellow, grey and green. Luke caught a glimpse of sunken, midnight-black eyes and his pulse began to pound. His fingers flexed on the hilt of his lightsaber.

“Come in, come in!” The being reached long, knobby, sucker-tipped fingers toward them. “We’ve been waiting for you!”

Out of the corner of his eye, Luke saw Mara step forward. His stomach knotted as she passed him, her steps wary but decisive.

“You’re not who we saw before,” she observed cautiously, stepping through the doorway.

Luke moved quickly, pulling level with her, suddenly certain that if he did not, the door would close before he got through, cutting him off from her.

“Hmm? Oh, no!” The creature – a Ho’Din, Luke could see now - waved lanky arms mirthfully, as if Mara had made a joke. “That was the Master. And _it_. Not me. Come, come – we’ll go up. I made tea.”

Luke and Mara exchanged glances. By unvoiced agreement, they fell into step side by side, blades unlit but ready. Fleshy tubes on the Ho’Din’s head bobbed and weaved like a nest of serpents. Their scales were a washed-out violet, not the grey Luke had initially taken them for, but the color did nothing to dispel the crawling unease that consumed his skin at the unnatural movement.

“I make the tea myself,” the being continued blithely. “From my plants. So good, my plants.” His tone reminded Luke of a boy in the early throes of first love, dreamy and passionate.

He chittered on, waving bony arms with rhapsodic energy as he talked, always in that too-young, too-bright voice. Luke’s eyes shied away, searched out the dark doorways they were passing.

Mara drifted closer, close enough that her shoulder brushed his arm. “The Promenade,” she whispered. “Mid-level.” Her eyes darted toward him and she licked her lips, a nervous tell he rarely saw. “Do you feel it? Something – like Endor, but… not.”

“A stain,” he murmured, his left hand finding her hip in a brief, reassuring caress. “In the Force.” He let himself feel it more clearly before allowing the shields he’d unconsciously called up rise again. “The original miners sheltered here in the first radiation storms, I think. Died here, terrified.”

He watched her shoulders square, her calm boosted slightly by the affirmation that her erratic Force abilities had been on target, this time.

“Here!” Their guide announced, gleefully. They stopped in front of an open-face turbolift. Only two of its interior lights worked, but the teeth-rattling hum emanating from it suggested its motors, while in dire need of repair, were in some kind of working order. “Two levels.” He herded them inside, then swirled in self-importantly, punching buttons on the unlit control box with his knuckles so as not to get them stuck to the tiny suction cups on his finger pads. “Much nicer there. You’ll see.”

The lift lumbered into motion, rusted gears and pulleys creaking and moaning as they inched upward.

“I’m sorry,” Luke said, conjuring up a polite apology. “I didn’t catch your name.”

“I am Jeho,” the Ho’Din said with a flourish. Mara leaned back to avoid the carelessly enthusiastic sweep of his long arm. “Garden Master of Nub Saar.”

Luke worked extremely hard to keep his distaste from twisting his face. “You tend the plants in the outer ring, then?”

“Yes!” he nodded vigorously. “Magnificent, are they not?”

“Hungry,” Mara observed, coolly.

“Ah, yes,” the Ho’Din’s expression fell and his shoulders slumped. “I have tried to keep them well fed. But the Master has summoned fewer guests, of late.” He perked up again. “But there will be more, soon.”

“Bringing more artifacts?” Luke guessed.

Light burst through the top of the lift as they came up on what must have been the inhabited level of the station. Luke blinked, his eyes adjusting as the floor came more fully into view and the lift crunched to a stop.

“No, no,” Jeho pursed his lips and ushered them out. “To serve Mistress, of course!”

“Your Mistress?” There was _another_ person lurking in this place they had yet to meet?

“Oh, yes,” the Ho’Din bustled forward. “Come, come.”

“Whoa.” Luke stopped three steps out of the lift.

“Classic Old Money Imperial,” Mara muttered under her breath, snagging his sleeve between her fingers and pulling him along. “Twenty credits says his ‘Master’ is our industrialist – and the bastard we met earlier.”

“This place is a like a fun house,” Luke murmured back, eyes sweeping over the lavish swaths of silk and velvet that hid the station’s metal walls. “Something new around every corner.”

Some kind of faux marble – it couldn’t possibly be _real_ \- coated the floors, and the ceiling soared away at least two stories. Every piece of furniture appeared to be polished wood or stone. He couldn’t fathom what it must have cost, let alone how they’d gotten it here. He glanced down at the bandages on his hand and arms, the just-perceptible outline of the splints under his pantlegs. If he hadn’t borne the evidence on his own body, he could almost have believed that he’d imagined the jungle below. It didn’t seem possible for it to coexist so closely with this luxury.

“Do you put sugar in your tea? Jeho asked, genially.

Nausea roiled unexpectedly in Luke’s gut. The eager innocence in the man’s tone reminded him of his niece and nephews. The way they sweetly offered Threepio tea during make-believe tea-parties, knowing full well it was a hollow gesture – he’d never be able to drink it.

“No, thank you,” he heard himself say, distantly.

_Wrongness_ seeped out of the linen-draped cart on which the elegant silver tea set rested. It crept outward, dampening the richly hued wall hangings until they seemed to molder with grave rot. Luke took an involuntary step back as it spread.

“No sugar for you, my dear,” the Ho’Din informed Mara, conversationally. “Mistress doesn’t approve of it. You haven’t eaten, have you? It will be better if you haven’t.”

“What will be better?” Mara asked, narrowing her eyes at the alien as it lifted delicate china cups and turned back to them.

“The procedure,” he said, beaming. “It’s soon, you know. We’re most excited. Master’s been practicing and he’s got it all sorted out now.”

The wrongness exploded into a scream in the back of Luke’s head. “Mara -.”

A body hurtled down from above. Luke jumped back, his thumb hovering over the switch of his saber as the newcomer landed in an artistically executed three-point landing, one hand flat on the floor, his red saber snap-hissing to life in the other. The man’s lip curled in a sneer.

_“Skywalker.”_

Luke dropped into a half-crouch, ignoring the pain that shot through his legs. He hadn’t been able to properly see his enemy through the Blinding earlier. He took a half-second now to register the dark brown eyes, fashionably cut ebony hair, and the suave smirk slashing across a square-jawed, tawny skinned face. Blackness hung in a cold cloud around the ruby of his aura.

“No, no!” Jeho fretted, the teacups clattering against their saucers in his jittery hands. “No fighting! This is a _happy_ day!”

“Stay back!” Mara snapped at the Ho’Din. She dropped into a half-crouch herself, lightsaber hilt raised in a one-handed grip, her bandaged left hand held away from her body in a warding gesture to the gardener.

“Such a commanding voice.” The man holding the red blade purred, his eyes fixing raptly on Mara.

Luke’s hackles rose. Mara snapped a cutting retort, but Luke didn’t process it, blood pounding in his ears at the carnal hunger the man projected – the same as he had before, but deeper now – wildly unchecked.

“Whatever you think you’re doing,” Luke said tightly, forcing the Sith’s attention back to him. “It’s over now. Turn back from the dark side. Let us help you.”

“Thank you,” the man laughed, arrogantly. “But I prefer to help myself.”

Flinging his free hand out, he shouted, “tadti’ an ki!” Then he lunged at Luke, a vicious, overhand swing that was easy to block but sent impact jarring down Luke’s arms.

The Force warped, folding and bending in ways that shouldn’t have been possible. Darkness rolled through, dropping the temperature in the room a dozen degrees in an instant.

Mara shouted. Luke deflected another blow and twisted. What he’d seen in the Force as a rod was, in fact, a full-length staff. Blacker than pitch, it was curved into spirals on both ends. The bottom spiral held a glowing stone twice the size of his fist. It hovered in the center of the room, its stone ‘face’ tracking Mara as she ran, grabbing for something Luke couldn’t see.

The Sith struck again and Luke’s attention reverted to the battle at hand. The man obviously had training. Even distracted, Luke recognized classic Form V maneuvers in the Sith’s aggressive attacks. But there was a disjointed clumsiness to his approach that Luke recognized from his own early days – his opponent lacked experience, and it would be his undoing.

The Force wailed and Luke switched to Force Sight a split second before blinding whiteness knifed through his skull again. He caught the man’s swing and Force-shoved him backward. Crimson splashed across the inside of his eyes, like the spray of entrails against a wall. The world distorted.

“Mara!” Still in combat crouch, Luke pivoted on his heel. The staff had torn into Mara again, was gouging out her soul, drinking it in through a neat rope of energy, as if sucking her lifeblood through a straw. There was nothing she could do. They’d found no defense against the staff before and whatever she’d tried this time had done no good.

Before the Sith could reengage him, Luke did the only thing he could think of that might make an impact. Flinging himself forward, he planted himself between the rod and Mara. The clawing black hand raked across his chest like a clutch of vibroblades. He gasped, everything tilting and spinning as he felt himself begin to bleed. Triumph soared headily through the pain as he made out the gold of his own soul eddying into Mara’s in the stone the staff held in its base.

_“Stop!”_

There was pounding of feet, impact. Luke slammed sideways, smacking his head on the floor, hard. His lightsaber slid away, across the marble out of sight. Disoriented, he tried to roll over – he had to get to his feet! Invisible weight held him down. Red poured across his sight again, obscuring everything.

“Mara!” He yelled. “Get away from her!”

He grunted, pulling on the Force, pushing back against the darkness that rolled across the room like the rumbling cackle of a mad crone.

There was movement at his side. A sallow, puce-green aura barely visible through the murk.

“This is a _happy_ day,” the Ho’Din’s petulant voice was close. Luke felt something boney by his ear – a knee, maybe? “No more fighting. _Tea._ ”

Luke opened his mouth to argue – to insist they leave Mara alone. Something thick and sickeningly sweet splashed across his tongue. He gagged, tried to turn his head. Couldn’t. He closed his mouth. Suction-cupped fingers latched onto his face. The Ho’Dinn was inhumanly strong. Luke thrashed, impotently, as his jaw was pried open, the knobby finger-pads digging bruisingly into his skin, his gums, the bones of his face.

_“Tea!”_ Jeho’s voice had gone high-pitched, a screeched demand.

More liquid, bubbling hot in his throat. Luke choked. The syrupy substance clogged his airway, burned in his nostrils. His chest constricted, struggling for air. There was none. Heat seared through his chest as the substance forced its way into his stomach and his lungs. Panic pounded with his racing pulse.

Then the weight was gone – Jeho, too. But it was already too late. His head felt the size of a Hutt’s, blackness encroaching on the bloody grey-green mist of his vision. Raising swollen eyes, he caught a single warped image of a ruby aura crouching over the prone remains of Mara’s bronzed-amber presence. He was vaguely aware of a gurgling sound that might have come from his own chest – and then there was only darkness.

* * *

Luke was dozing in his x-wing in a starless stretch of space. He was tired and everything hurt. He couldn’t remember why. The radio crackled. Through half-closed eyes, he was aware of two different channels. They fuzzed with static. His attention wandered.

“Skywalker.”

The sound of his name pulled it back.

A tiny light on the right side of his control surface lit up. “Skywalker, _wake up_.”

“Mara?” Groggily, he tried to sit up a little straighter. The motion sent pain through his legs. Why did his legs hurt?

A second light lit on Luke’s left. A shaky gasp came through and then the light winked out.

Undefined worry niggled at him and Luke struggled to get his eyes open. His helmet felt like it was made of lead and his visor was too dark.

The first light lit again. “Skywalker, _wake up_! Can you hear me?”

“Yes,” he mumbled. “Mara?”

“No!” The gasp from the other channel was a word, this time, horrified and breathless.

Luke’s brow furrowed and he squirmed fully upright. “Who’s there?”

The light on the left winked alive again. “I won’t.” Another gasp. “If you don’t get your kriffing hands -.” The channel cut off.

Luke jabbed at the button with stiff fingers. That had been Mara’s voice! Weak and ragged, but hers – he knew it.

“Mara? Mara!” There was no response.

The light on the right of his dash illuminated. “Luke! Luke you have to wake up. _Now._ I can feel you, dammit, _wake up_!”

That was Mara’s voice, too. She couldn’t be in two places – why was she on two totally different channels? Why was she strong and clear on one and so thready on the other? Luke stabbed at the right side of the console. “Mara? What’s going on?”

“Skywalker!” The urgency of her voice rang through him like a bell, clearing the cloudiness from his head. “You’ve been drugged. You need to wake up.”

“I am awake.” Wasn’t he? Another thought distracted him. “How are you talking to me? You’ve never been able to -.”

“WAKE UP.”

Luke snapped back to consciousness dizzy and nauseous. He sucked in a breath and the Force, then let the breath out slowly, bleeding the ill feeling and some of the toxin in his bloodstream into the flow the Force. He stayed still, slitting his eyes open while he repeated the procedure, clearing his senses a little more.

The cool marble of the floor pressed against his left side. There was fabric a few arm-lengths ahead of him. Strips of it. Familiar. His brain supplied the image of the same fabric in his hands as he slipped it over Mara’s head, smoothed it over her hips. Fear tangled in his gut. He focused past the fabric. Found booted feet.

Luke repeated the breathe-and-cleanse and sent his gaze up, past the boots. His heart jolted into his throat.

Mara was naked, strapped face down to a metal table bolted to the floor and tilted at a 45-degree angle. Her wrists were manacled near her throat and thick straps were belted just beneath her shoulders and at the top of her thighs. Her makeshift boots had been cut off and angular cuffs locked her heels and ankles against the table, denying her purchase or the ability to twist her lower half. Her hair straggled out of its coronet braid and her eyes were huge in her ashen face.

The Sith stood behind her, his sleeves rolled to the elbow. Luke watched him turn away, his arms moving. When he turned back, he lifted a wet cloth and ran it along Mara’s shoulders. The water ran down her back, and he repeated the motion slightly lower, dragging both the cloth and then his other hand across her shoulder blades. Mara’s eyes scrunched shut and she snarled.

The Sith chuckled. Fury boiled inside Luke and he accelerated the cleansing. He had to _move._

“Sariss loves when I bathe her,” the Sith said, conspiratorially. “She moans when do it just like this.” He re-soaked the cloth and dragged it sensuously down Mara’s spine. “I look forward to hearing her moans from your mouth.”

A spike of rage took Luke’s breath and his eyes darted toward his feet, seeking out the source. On a table – no, an altar? – behind the Sith three stones lay on low, circular bases. Beside them, he could make out the glint of some kind of metal. There was a shift inside him and somehow he was in two places at once. On the floor, looking at the altar, but on the altar, too, starting down at his body.

_Luke._

The voice was in his head – the way he’d heard Ben after his mentor died. But it wasn’t coming from the body strapped to the table. It was coming from beside him – _within_ him – the piece of him on the table.

_Mara?_

_Kill me, Farmboy. There isn’t much time and you_ **_promised_ ** _._

_No – what’s going on? Why -?_

Confusion blurred his senses as he clearly _felt_ the Sith’s hands slide down Mara’s back. Felt the soft warmth of a towel rubbing against his skin. No – _her_ skin, but as starkly if it were his.

Mara’s body growled again, weakly.

“You should be grateful,” the man chided, as if she were a misbehaving child. “it’s an honor to be chosen for service.”

Ugly emotions Luke couldn’t hope to name or fully grasp flooded him, left him floundering.

“Now,” the Sith continued, replacing the cloth in the basin of water. “You’re going to feel a prick.”

Luke watched in horror as the man picked up a syringe and placed it against Mara’s hip. She made a small sound as he depressed it, injecting a dark blue liquid into the muscle.

“It’s a paralytic,” he explained, sounding almost pleased. “It’ll keep you from moving while I work.”

He lifted a hand to the base of her spine and drew the outline of neat rectangle with the tip of a finger. Luke felt the touch like electricity against his own body.

“I’ll make a cut here,” the Sith was telling Mara’s body. “I’ll put my beloved’s soul stone in the Muir Amulet and when I press it right there,” he flattened his palm against her skin right in the hollow between her hip bones, “it will _latch_.” There was relish in his voice that made Luke sick. “Her soul will bond to your body. Then I’ll give her the anti-paralytic, get her stitched up and everything will be the way it was meant to be before Vader interfered.”

The Sith stepped back. “I’m going to fetch Sariss’s favorite robe. She’ll want it once she’s back in a body.” He tilted his head, displeasure coloring his voice. “It’s regrettable I couldn’t fully remove you – damn Skywalker interfering.” He shook his head. “My beloved is strong, though. She’ll crush what remains of you.” He leaned in close – close enough Luke could feel his breath on Mara’s ear.  “I suggest you spend your last moments figuring out what you’re going to say to your Master when you reach the Sith hells and he calls you to account for bending your knee to Skywalker.”

_This can’t happen._

Mara’s sense was close – more than close. Intertwined with his.

_The part of you that is still in your body needs to kill me. Now!_

_The part of me -_?

Then it clicked. _Soul stones._ The staff had taken most of Mara’s soul, but part of his, as well. Taken them into the _same stone_ . With his body’s eyes, he could _see_ them, her amber shot through with his gold. The part of him that was with her grasped for her, fiercely.

_I love you._

_Prove it._

Luke pushed his consciousness back into his body. He flexed his fingers and toes, testing his ability to move. Not great, but enough. He felt Mara’s eyes on him, her presence still startlingly close to his own as he lurched to his feet. Reaching out with both hands, he called his saber and Mara’s, igniting them both, simultaneously.

“Master, I brought -.” Jeho’s sing-song voice ended in a scream. “You!” He dropped the tray he’d been carrying, grabbing for a blaster.

Luke pushed with the Force, knocking the weapon from his hands. “Walk away,” he ordered, low and dangerous.

Jeho shrieked incoherently and rushed at him, wildly. Luke cut him down without hesitation. The attention cost him, however. Still unbalanced by the split awareness of his own body and the part of himself trapped in the stone, he was a fraction of a second too late to block the Sith’s blaster bolt.

Both sabers snapped off as he was thrown backward, the stun shot hammering him into the side of the table Mara was strapped to. His head cracked against the metal and he went down. The Sith strode over and, before he could react, Luke was convulsing from a second point-blank shot.

The Sith leaned over him, grinning. “If you wanted a front-row seat, Skywalker, you could simply have asked.”

Straightening, he headed to the altar. Laying his blaster down atop it, he picked up a small, thickly bladed knife.  “I was wondering if I’d get to introduce myself.” He walked back to Mara. Luke struggled to breathe. Fought to move, but every nerve in his body was misfiring – overwhelmed and short-circuiting.

“I am Yun.” The Sith pressed a hand flat against the middle of Mara’s back. “Your father,” he lifted the knife. “Killed my beloved.”

Luke made a strangled yelp as the Sith pressed the tip of the blade to Mara’s back and a line of fire opened up along his spine.

“Left her to die in my arms.” The knife and the excruciating pain in Luke’s back cut sideways. “On orders of the Emperor, of course. Only the fact that she knew how to summon the Darkstaff saved her.”

Luke stared up into Mara’s glassy, terrified eyes. She made an inhuman noise and his back exploded with pain. His eyes rolled into the back of his head, his body going into shock. The part of him not inside himself watched from the stone as Yun peeled back a section of skin and flesh, opening Mara’s back like a butcher taking the prime cuts off a roast. Blood coated his hands and forearms and poured from her body, spilling down her legs. Distantly, Luke felt it soaking into his pantlegs, pooling against his skin.

_I promised,_ he thought, desperately. _I promised._

“She has been trapped too long,” Yun said. He leaned over Luke’s body, gloating. “But my Mistress was most insistent that she have the body an Emperor’s Hand. A fitting vessel for her power and vengeance on the man who ordered her death. The first attempt failed.” His smile twisted. “But then we learned that the son of Vader had lost his heart to one and I was grateful. It’s so much better this way – we have our vengeance on both of those who wronged us!”

“You…” Luke rasped, “can’t…. have her.”

“Yes,” Yun cooed mockingly. “I can.” He turned away.

For a heartbeat, Luke stopped breathing, straining with everything in him - everything he had access to – to _move_ . There was a thrust, unexpected and so sharp and fast it was its own torment. And then everything was crystalline. His vision snapped into perfect focus. Energy that wasn’t his – _Mara’s_ he recognized – flooded him.

His body rose, oblivious to pain, nerves – everything. Everything but the hilt that slapped into his palm. It was Mara’s, the songsteel glimmering in the light, the blade snap-hissing into avenging golden light.

Yun was spinning, his face twisted in shock and outrage. But to the hybrid that was both Luke and Mara, he seemed to move at a crawl. Thought flowed between them in perfect synchronicity. Luke saw his left hand lift, watched in thrilled delight as Mara accessed the Force through him, calling the stone toward his palm with unerring accuracy. In perfect time, he raised her saber. Brought it down in a golden arc.

Yun howled and leapt at Luke, his saber flying to his hand.  One step. Two.

Whole and centered with Mara inside him, Luke moved with absolute calm. In a single fluid motion, he dropped. Yun’s saber arced harmlessly through the space where his throat had been. Grounding himself with feet and Force, Luke wrapped both hands around the delicate hilt of Mara’s saber and pushed straight up. The humming blade slid from Yun’s groin to his skull like a hot knife through blue butter.

Luke thumbed the saber off. His hands fell limp and shaking at his sides. Mara receded. Luke stared, chest heaving, his entire body trembling. Yun lay on the floor in two precise halves, the shattered remains of Sariss’s soul stone scattered around him.

Turning, Luke’s heart clenched. Mara’s body was porcelain white and deathly still. Her eyes were fixed forward, vacant and sightless.

_You kept your promise._ Her voice was soft in his mind. The gratitude in it wrenched a sob from his chest. _Thank you._

_No._

Luke swallowed the next sob, ferocious determination taking over, lending strength to stiff limbs and still-stuttering nerves. He staggered forward.

_I kept my promise. Now you keep yours._


	5. Uncharted Territory

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Life or death._ His thoughts caressed the edges of her mind, seeking entry to her dreams.  
>  _A bonded pair_ , her voice returned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Death Star-size thanks are owed to Celina for helping me make this entire fic work and all of her patience as I made edits and then more edits and then... you get the idea. Thanks due to Frangi, as well, for being encouraging forever about my goal of writing a Halloween fic. : ) 
> 
> Happy Halloween!

“This is Luke Skywalker. Almas Station, do you read me?”

Static.

Luke cupped a hand around Mara’s cold cheek and cradled her a little closer to his chest, trying to project his warmth into her. She floated just beneath consciousness and he stroked his sense against hers, marveling at the sensation of being inside her. It was unlike any Force bond he’d ever seen – more than he could ever have hoped for.

Leaning forward, careful not to put even the slightest pressure on her back, he toggled the pitted comm switch again. “This is Luke Skywalker. Almas Station, do you read me?”

“Luke!” The dented comm speaker popped and spit as Han’s voice hollered through it. “Are you all right?”

“We need a pickup right away. Mara’s hurt… badly.”

Luke recognized Lando’s voice in the background, but couldn’t make out the words.

“Where are you?” Han demanded.

“The Operations Center,” Luke replied, glancing around at the fallen beams and broken railings that formed the jagged landscape of the ruined room. The console at which he sat was one of only two that remained intact and upright.  “Very top of the Core,” he said. “There’s an emergency airlock – looks like it held an escape pod once. You should be able to dock there.”

A pause. “Right,” Han came back. “We’re in the _Lady Luck,_ already on our way to you. We’ll be there – five minutes, tops.”

“Thanks, Han.” Luke flipped the switch off. Gently, he ran a hand over the purple satin he’d torn from a wall to swath Mara’s body in and kissed her clammy forehead. “Hold on, Sweetheart. We’ll be out of here in no time.”

Her sense stirred against his. A wash of agony came with it and she shied away when she felt him flinch, self-recrimination flaring.

_Don’t._ He chased her sense with his, leaning into the pain. _It’s all right. Let me help._

Mara hesitated and Luke caught the memory of her sharing his body, his power when they’d slain Sariss’s soul stone.

_Yes,_ he urged, unable to hide his excitement. _Yes – try. It’s all right. I don’t mind. Please._

Carefully, Mara’s sense slid along his own. Used him as a bridge to the well of power he carried. She sank into it with a shuddering sigh, pain relief and healing soaking into her. It was shockingly intimate and Luke lost time in the euphoria of it.

The scrape of corroded gears at the airlock wrenched him back to the outside world.

_Stay there,_ he told Mara. _I need to move us, and it’s going to hurt._

He felt her acknowledgment and slid an arm under her thighs. His other arm braced high on her back, his hand curving around her chest and fisting the purple fabric to keep it in place. His legs, hips and back cramped and threatened to give when he stood but he pushed through. After the first few stumbling steps, his gait evened out and he was able to painfully pick his way across the broken floor plates and crushed equipment to the airlock.

Lando’s face appeared on the other side of the transparisteel porthole, indicating that the temporary walkway was in place and secure. Luke didn’t bother with the controls, just Forced the hatch open. It rolled back with a groan.

Lando assessed them both with a swift glance. “Do you need me to take her?”

“No.” Luke’s fingers curled into the silk in instinctive possessiveness.

“All right. Come on. Han’s got us steady but we need to get out of here. There’s another radiation storm on the rise.”

“You don’t have to tell me twice.”

* * *

The _Lady Luck’s_ medical bay was small but spotlessly clean. The surgically bright lighting was glaring after the station’s gloom and Luke squinted against it, his eyes watering.

“Put Jade on that bunk,” Lando ordered, graceful as ever under stress. “Then get yourself in the other one.”

Luke’s entire body trembled with strain and exhaustion and he focused all his attention on moving Mara carefully. He eased her down on her side, her back facing the wall but well away from it. His arms left crimson smears on the crisp white cover sheet. The blood-blackened silk slipped, revealing the deep bruising already forming around the raw red lines where Yun had sliced open her back. Luke’s stomach churned at the memory of raw flesh, fresh gouts of blood where he’d thought there couldn’t possibly be any left as the amulet’s spidery legs dug in the muscles around her spine.

“Han’ll have us back on Almas in minutes,” Lando continued, hitting buttons to bring medical devices online. “I’ll do a full scan, and we can have her in professional hands as soon as we touch down,” he assured Luke. “I’ve got authorization to make emergency medical decisions for her –she’ll get the best care available.”

Luke froze, his stomach clenching. “No.”

“What?” Confusion colored Lando’s question.

Luke straightened, the air around him thickening as he subconsciously barred Mara from the rest of the world. How would he make a medical team understand that her soul – _their joined souls_ – was embedded in a stone he’d personally placed in a Sith amulet and pressed against her spine with bloody, shaking hands? There were no words to explain the way it had drilled into muscle and bone, irreversibly latching and lodging. They’d write him off as insane – still drugged. They’d reopen the gruesome wound, carve the amulet out of her, rip her soul away _again_ -.

“I’ll take care of her.” He put the Force behind his words for emphasis. “I can keep her in a healing trance. Do everything she needs.”

Lando’s eyes darted to Mara.

She didn’t even look alive, Luke knew that. Bone white and drenched in her own blood, nothing but a scrap of stained silk draped over her. He was sure he didn’t look much better, but he had to hold his ground. Had to. He wouldn’t lose her now. Couldn’t.

“I don’t doubt your abilities,” Lando said, carefully, his dark eyes sliding back to Luke “but if even a fraction of that blood is hers… And forgive me for saying so, but you don’t look all that good yourself.” His jaw set. “I made a promise to Karrde _personally_ that if anything happened, I’d make sure Mara was taken care of. I don’t know how I’d explain putting his Second in the hands of a beat-up Jedi instead of a qualified medical team with state-of-the-art equipment.”

He’d thank his friend, later, for being protective of her in that moment. Thank Talon, too, for having made sure details were in place to ensure her care. But now – in _this_ moment – they were unwittingly part of the threat and he had to cut them off. Had to figure out _how_ -.

He felt words on his tongue. They weren’t his own – Mara’s presence was behind them. It was disconcerting but, trustingly, he opened his mouth and let them fall out.

“Marry us.”

Lando’s brow furrowed. “Pardon?”

For a second, Luke’s mind blanked. Then it _thrilled_ \- hurtled forward, seizing the opportunity.

“Marry us,” he repeated, adamantly this time. “Right now. This is your ship – legally you can. You know we were going to when this was over, anyway. Once we’re wed, I’ll be next of kin – all rights to make decisions for her pass to me. You’ll be blameless.”

Suspicion and caution darkened Lando’s visage. “You know I can’t,” he said slowly. “Not unless she’s in her right mind.” He shot another glance past Luke to Mara. “And capable of speaking.”

Luke felt Mara pull back, winced at her suffering as she dragged her body back to wakefulness. Turning, he stumbled a half-step back, falling until he sat on the edge of the bed by her stomach.

“Sweetheart.” He stroked matted hair away from Mara’s face, crusted blood flaking off onto the sheets under his fingers.

She dragged her eyes open. The part of him inside her could feel the massive effort it took and he tried to push more of his own flagging strength into her. “Can you talk?”

Mara’s head moved an inch in an approximation of a nod. “Yes,” she rasped, barely audibly.

Luke swiveled his head to Lando.

“All right,” Calrissian said, eyeing them both. “I’m going to take the liberty of assuming you want the short version.”

“The shortest you’ve got,” Luke said, slipping his hands around Mara’s bandaged left one.

“Right.” Lando smoothed his tunic and rolled his shoulders. “Luke Skywalker, do you take Mara Jade to be your wife in accordance with the laws and provisions of the New Republic and both your home planets?”

“I do.” Luke held Mara’s eyes and pressed a kiss to her exposed fingertips, twining his Force presence more tightly around hers.

“Mara Jade, do you take Luke Skywalker to be your husband in accordance with the laws and provisions of the New Republic and both your home planets?” He paused. “And, specifically, in this instance, grant him all the rights to make decisions for you?”

Mara’s sense leaned into Luke’s, resolute despite the shredding pain fighting for her attention, but her eyes moved to Lando. “I…do,” she croaked. “Both.”

“Well, that’s it, then,” Lando spread his hands, somewhat incredulously. “By the power vested in me as the Captain of this vessel, it is my privilege and my pleasure announce you wed in the sight of sentient life – and the Force, I assume.”

Luke felt weightless. Surreal.

“Technically, it’s your right to kiss your bride,” Calrissian said, seriously, “but I suggest you skip the formalities and get on with that healing trance you mentioned.”

Luke nodded, half dazed. “Lock the door behind you,” some still-functioning piece of himself commanded. “We’ll let ourselves out when the trance is over. We’re not to be disturbed.”

Lando lifted his hands, palm out. “You got it, friend.” He shot one more look at Mara, then spun and strode out.

Luke listened for the door to seal, then rose on stiff, aching legs. Pulling the satin from Mara, he let it fall to the floor. With a groan at his muscles’ sharp protests, he stripped off his ruined clothing. Tottering a few steps, he grabbed a heavy blanket from a warmer and then returned to the bed. With painstaking care, he crawled over Mara and lay down. Dragging the blanket over them, he tucked her back tightly against his front from shoulder to ankle. Wrapping his arms around her, he kissed the soft skin under her jaw, unperturbed by the layers of filth. Mara’s fingers moved slightly, folding into his and her presence nuzzled into his, hazy with pain.

He had everything, now. The Sith was gone, Mara had married him – they even had a Force bond unlike anything he’d ever imagined. The rest of the galaxy ceased to exist. Fear and pain evaporated. There was only his wife in his arms, a warm, soft bed holding them, and the Force at his fingertips.

“Let go, Love,” Luke said softly in Mara’s ear. “I’ll take care of everything.”

* * *

_Six Standard Months Later_

Han set the open-topped speeder down lightly on the pad outside the Temple. The lights of passing vehicles, messenger droids and cloudclutters winked off its deep blue finish only to be swallowed up by the shadows that engulfed the darkened archways into the tower.

“Give the kids a kiss for me,” Luke told his brother-in-law, stepping out and shutting the door.

“Sure. Hey, listen - tell your wife she should come next time.” His lopsided half-grin was painfully awkward but sincere. “I’ll play nice.”

“She’s not avoiding you, Han. You know how hard she’s been working, between the Temple restoration and the plan to move the Academy. The Senate Oversight Committee is going to step down next week if we play our cards right – she’s not leaving anything to chance.”

“I know,” Solo said, his expression creasing. “I just meant – in general, you know? You said she’s all healed up, but she’s not getting out much. Might be good for her to quit skulking around there and get out a little. More’n a few minutes at a time, I mean.”

Luke smiled. “Thanks, Han. I’ll tell her you asked – maybe she can make it to dinner next week.”

“Yeah. Leia’d like that. You know she’s only teasing about never forgiving you eloping.” He waved a hand. “She’ll lay off about it - another year or two, max.”

Luke chuckled. Leaning over, he clapped a hand on his brother-in-law’s shoulder. “Go home, Han. Get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Right.” Solo shifted the speeder into gear and gave Luke a wry two fingered salute. “G’night.”

Breathing deep, Luke filled his lungs with the artificially crisp Fall air, rich with the scent of hai’ka blossoms. He watched Han’s speeder merge into traffic, then turned and strode into the blackness of the Temple’s shadows. The magcon field shimmered a ghostly blue as he passed through before vanishing again. Slipping effortlessly into Force Sight, he swept his gaze through the silent stillness of the Processional Way. The floors and pillars had been scoured clean to reveal the structure’s freshly bared bones. His footsteps echoed in the emptiness, rising with the now ever-present tang of cleansers, wood shavings, and paint to taunt the frescoed gods overhead.

They no longer whispered when he passed. Or perhaps he simply no longer cared to hear them.

Pressing his palm to the biometric locks that sealed off the Northwestern Tower, he reached out for the part of himself that lived inside Mara. He swirled his sense through her, taking stock, and immediately quickened his steps. The polymer sheeting the construction droids hung over unfinished rooms fluttered around him, crinkling and hissing at the corners of his vision as he passed. The air got denser as he reached a landing and turned. He flipped open a hidden panel and leaned forward. A flat beam of blue light shot out, mapping one eye. The biometric scanner beeped and the newly installed blast doors slid open.

The air felt like gourd soup. Reaching up, Luke started undoing the fasteners on his formal jacket as he closed the distance to the end of the hall. Another lock, this one Force-controlled. The door to his quarters opened and Luke stepped inside. Tossing his jacket carelessly on the counter of the tiny kitchenette as he passed, he emerged from the short hall into the main room.

Mara sat, bare legs crossed, hands open palm-up on her knees. A perfect meditation pose – except that she was nude and hovering two feet off the floor. Her long, unbound hair stood in an electrified cloud around her head, an unseen breeze rippling through it. What few items the spartan room contained that weren’t nailed down circled around her, weaving and bobbing. Charred black flecks swirled in a looping pattern through the other objects.

She’d scorched through another shirt, then. His lips quirked. Probably another one of his.

Luke pushed through the hazy air. Electrostatic energy crackled at his movement, sparking from nothing into luminous balls that zipped across the room, then flashed out at random along the walls. He circled around until he could see her face in the soft glow of the city light filtering through the half-shaded windows.

Mara stared blankly ahead, green eyes vacant and rimmed with a thick band of gold.

Stepping in close, Luke lifted a hand and drew the back of his fingers down her cheek, tenderly. “Mara, can you hear me?”

“Luke.” She murmured his name, then blinked, slowly.

“Can I help?”

She nodded, eyes still unfocused. “Hurts.”

“Your back?”

“Mmhm.”

“All right. Do you want to walk?”

Mara made a face at the thought. “No.”

She’d been fighting for control for a while then – let her muscles lock in the meditation pose. Gently, Luke slipped one arm around his wife. With his other hand, he coaxed her still-floating body out of its stiff form until he could hook an arm beneath her knees. It was only a few steps to their bedroom. The airy, high-ceilinged space was empty except for an enormous bed. Dark, save for a few fat pillar candles flickering in sconces on the walls.

Luke used the Force to pull the covers down and gently laid Mara on her side. He felt her wrap herself around him from her side of the bond and made a soft approving noise as she pulled heavily on his concentration to regain her own.

Stripping his clothing off, Luke left it where it fell and climbed into the bed. Laying back on a surfeit of pillows, he helped Mara over him. She settled into a comfortable straddle, then leaned forward. Luke took the invitation, lifting his head to nuzzle and nip at the peaked tips of her breasts, drawing a whine. He slid one hand around her hip and conjured penetrating heat, pushing it into the base of her spine. The fingers of his other hand slipped between her legs, applying just the right pressure exactly where she liked it.

Mara gave a low moan. _“Luke.”_

“I’m here.”

She dropped her head, her mouth finding his hungrily as her hips began to rock.

_That’s it. Burn it off, Sweetheart. Burn it all off._

* * *

Hours later, when Mara had worked off the Force energy she couldn’t control and the candles had guttered out, Luke lay on his side in light of Coruscant’s four moons and trailed his fingers along his wife’s spine. She lay on her stomach, her right arm tucked under her pillow. Her left was stretched toward him, her fingers intertwined with his. She slept soundly, eyelashes fluttering against flushed cheeks as she dreamt. Luke’s fingertips slid down to the small of her back and fanned out, tracing the bony protuberances of the Sith amulet buried beneath her skin.

It lay dormant now and Luke leaned over to kiss Mara’s shoulder, pleased. She needed her sleep. The powers manifesting in her – her own, the amulet’s, some of it possibly even his, it was impossible to tell now – demanded much of her body.

Stroking her silky hair one more time, he slipped out of bed. His entire body protested the hard use, even as endorphins and the echoes of intense Force energy still lingered druggingly in his blood. Padding to the fresher, he took a brief turn through the sani-steam. Toweling his hair dry, he caught sight of himself in the mirror. Two eyes stared back at him… one blue, the other solid gold.

Walking back into the bedroom, Luke slid back under the covers and curved his body protectively around Mara’s.

_Life or death._ His thoughts caressed the edges of her mind, seeking entry to her dreams.

_A bonded pair,_ her voice returned.

A mental gate appeared, carved from amber with a walkway of gold. The gate swung open in welcome. Luke stepped through, all that he was sinking into Mara and oblivion.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yun, Sariss, Nub Saar, the Eskaron Race, Sith amulets and the Darkstaff are all EU canon, though I have adapted them to my own purposes here. If you have time, consider looking them up - their backstories are pretty cool!
> 
> Jeho, the gardener, is an OC but all of the plants mentioned are EU canon.

**Author's Note:**

> Photos of Luke and Mara's outfits are posted on my tumblr @jedimordsith.  
> Nub Saar looks like Deep Space 9.


End file.
